


love left her screaming at the screen

by swingingparty



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Banter, Coming Out, F/F, Freudian Elements, Gay Panic, Grimdark (Homestuck), Hurt/Comfort, Idiots in Love, Internalized Homophobia, Introspection, Miscommunication, POV Second Person, Snarky Broads and Their Flighty Horshitometer, Unrequited Crush, like baby got it BAD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-05
Updated: 2020-05-20
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:49:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 50,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24023128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swingingparty/pseuds/swingingparty
Summary: Your name is Rose Lalonde, you are nine years old, and you have just heard the wordgayfor the first time.
Relationships: Jade Harley & Rose Lalonde, Rose Lalonde & Dave Strider, Rose Lalonde/Kanaya Maryam
Comments: 63
Kudos: 132





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> so VERY disappointed by the lack of fics that like. address rose's sexuality and her potentially having things to work through in regards to that !!! guess i gotta do everything around here. also i am so nervous about posting this !!!! yikes!!! pls be nice i am stressin  
> also title is from snow by ricky montgomery :-)

Your name is Rose Lalonde, you are nine years old, and you have just heard the word _gay_ for the first time.

Your mother has invited someone over for dinner—a work colleague, you're able to discern—and though having guests over is such a rare occurrence that you honestly should be amazed just by the mere presence of another human being wandering around the too-empty rooms and halls of your house, you honestly cannot bring yourself to care. If you had your way, you would have treated this like any other night and kept to your usual routine of barricading yourself in your room and paying no mind to anything that happened downstairs short of another medical emergency. As it is, though, you decidedly do _not_ have your way, and have been forced to at least sulk and brood downstairs, in the company of your mother and her friend and the insurmountable quantity of wine the two of them seem hellbent on consuming in just the span of three short hours. You can only thank whatever god is still listening to you that your mother is not the one driving home tonight, block out the mindless chatter, and bury your nose in the pages of the book you're reading.

And this is the practice you fully intend on keeping up with for the rest of the evening; most of the things your mother says go straight over your head, and when she is paired with someone as equally inebriated as her, all comprehension of the dialogue you might have retained flies straight out the window. So you just try to ignore the talking as best as you can.

Until you hear it.

It only catches your attention because it is an unfamiliar term to you. You know it in some inherent sense, maybe, as if you had heard it in passing when you were a child, your brain holding onto only the vague remnants of the memory, but by and large it is a new word. A new concept. A new door that suddenly materializes in the center of your consciousness, all dark oak and padlocks, imposing yet significant in a way you don't even vaguely understand.

"I was talkin' to him, see," your mother's friend is saying, stumbling over her words only a little given the fact that she is currently midway through her third glass that evening. “Bout what he's gonna be doing next year to keep 'imself busy at school, and he says—Rox, get this, he says stage makeup. Stage makeup! For— _plays_ , and shit, I guess. An' he told me he's been—watchin’ shit on the Internet to learn how to do it, an' apparently he’s real fuckin' good at it now. What the fuck! And, Chrissake, this ain't the first time shit like this has happened with him, right? He's always been—” She drops her voice to an unfortunate parody of a stage whisper. You bite back a grimace. “Well, _like this_ , you know? Ever since he was a lil kid, always dressin’ up an playin’ with the girls and—and now the _makeup_ —and I just gotta wonder sometimes, you know—do you think—is he _gay?"_

 _Is he gay?_ You unfocus your gaze from the pages in front of you as the tail-end of her tirade hits, the final few words sinking in like a boulder dropped into a lake, sending waves pounding against the inside of your skull.Is he gay?

It's the newness of the word, you think. After all, you are an avid reader, and consider your own vocabulary to be complex and advanced, even at your young age, so any word you come across that you do not immediately understand the meaning of is one that sticks in your mind until you do. The odd familiarity the word has only makes it all the more interesting; maybe understanding it will unlock whatever is rising to the surface of your mind but refusing to fully emerge, remaining peskily just out of reach.

You think now might be a good time to abandon this conversation.

Mercifully, your mother is neck-deep in an all-too enthusiastic response to her friend's comment—you think the boy in question is her son, and you feel an odd, disjointed pang of sympathy for him—to notice you hopping down from the bar stool and slinking out of sight, rounding the corner and hurrying up the stairs to your bedroom. At worst, she will give you a halfhearted lecture about why not paying attention to guests is rude, Rosie; at best, she will not notice your departure in the slightest. You are confident it will be the latter, and shut the door to your bedroom with a satisfying click, breathing a sigh of relief at finally being back in your own space again. The agonies of forced socialization are, apparently, untold and really rather debilitating, even when you're not required to participate in the conversation at all beyond a few formalities. You make a mental note to feign illness the next time your mother has someone over, and settle down at your desk, turning your computer monitor on.

It's moments like this where you are so very grateful for your mother's negligence with her credit card. The embarrassment of having to look up what being gay means on her own work computer would be indescribable for reasons you don't entirely understand.

No matter. You open up a browser page, pause as you consider the best way to phrase this, and finally settle on punching in what does being gay mean into the search bar. Perhaps a little crudely phrased, but it seems to get the job done; a definition pops up on your screen after a second of loading, black text staring back out at you.

  1. _(of a person) homosexual (used especially of a man)._
  2. _(dated) lighthearted and carefree._



You frown. Not the most informative of definitions, although at least you now have an explanation for the sense of familiarity; you definitely recall seeing the term used in the dated sense once or twice in books you had read in the past. Still, this doesn't satisfy you for some reason; you scroll some more, finally clicking on a link below.

_Gay is a word used to describe someone who is homosexual. Today, the word usually means a person who is sexually attracted to people of the same sex and often that person can be also romantically interested in people of the same sex._

_Oh_. Alright, then.

You would be lying if you said that relationships of any variety—sexual or romantic—had crossed your mind much in your life. Given the fact that the nearest town from where you lived was a good forty minute drive through the veritable wilderness, your mother had decided that it was not worth the hassle to shepherd you that distance every day in order for you to attend public elementary school. At the very least, you both understood well enough what sort of awkward conversations would arise should it take her longer than strictly appropriate to come pick you up every day due to her erring on the side of inebriation just a little too much for her operating a car to be safe. As a consequence, much of your childhood had been spent under the tutelage of random scholars your mother had plucked from recommendations online. Or Criagslist.

It’s fair to say, then, that interactions with others kids have been few and far between. This has never particularly bothered you—if you're being honest, you find a lot of people your age to be sort of boring—but it has put a moratorium on what you assume to be the traditional practice of young kids such as yourself exploring childish romantic pursuits.

That's not to say that you don't understand the basic rules, though. You are a girl, so you will inevitably grow up and marry a boy. That's just how things have always worked for you; it's the narrative you've seen in every single piece of media you've ever consumed. Girls like boys and boys like girls and there is very little debate on the matter, as far as you've always been able to tell.

Though, it seems now, apparently not. You’re not quite sure what to do with this information.

You hum a little under your breath, cursor hovering over the button that will close the search page. After a moment in which you don't really know what you're deliberating upon, you move your cursor away, and simply close your computer, the webpage still open. It's not everyday your fundamental understanding of the world shifts like this, and you find yourself having a suddenly innumerable amount of questions in response.

You push yourself back from your desk, humming again. Later.

.:.

When you break it down to its essence, Freud’s arguments regarding the sexual tendencies of men and women can be boiled down to the statement that heterosexuality exists only as a social construct.

Well, that might be something of an oversimplification, but the bare bones of it remain same. Freud’s theory argues that heterosexuality came not exclusively from innate biological programming but also societal pressures to assimilate with the “norm,” so to speak. The argument could be made that the nuclear family—which, ironically enough, seemed to rise in prevalence somewhat in tandem with the more vitriolic anti-homosexual rhetoric America began to boast by the 20th century—has had a strong impact on this, too; children growing up living under rigidly heterosexual parents are more likely to follow suit in such romantic and sexual endeavors. Because he is Freud and thus everything must come back to the accursed Oedipus complex, the argument is all individuals experience some strong attraction to their same-sex parent—and presumably individuals of the same sex in general by extension—but out of desire to avoid falling into the aforementioned complex, those attractions are repressed with unconscious vehemence and precision across the board. Not only do individuals not let themselves be attracted to their same-sex parent, but they do not let themselves be attracted to any other person of the same sex to them.

Suffice to say, your research regarding these topics has been incredibly forthcoming. You've always had something of a niche fascination with the work of 20th-century psychologists—either they were so incorrect about everything it would be laudable were it not borderline hysterical, or they are simply right on the money—and fact that many of them also devoted large swathes of time to researching the depths of human sexuality is merely an added benefit. At the very least, you would rather spend your time trawling through _Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality_ than scour the depths of internet chatrooms to find anything even remotely helpful, though you still do the latter frequently. You're rapidly learning that they are less of an environment conducive towards any sort of productive conversations regarding sexuality and more a breeding ground for a particularly virulent form of homophobia.

That's another thing your research uncovers in almost record timing: the dim view much of society still seems intent on taking regarding individuals who are not heterosexual. Part of it is religion-based, part of it is fear of something new, part of it is simple antiquity, and all of it seems so interwoven in the fabric of society that you're almost entirely convinced the general populace will forever shun individuals whose sexualities do not line up with the traditional label of heterosexual.

Sometimes this makes you upset, disarmingly so. Certainly, it is hard to ignore such displays when they come up so frequently in the research you conduct. More often than not, you have to take steps back in the moments when you slip into chatrooms and are immediately assaulted by walls of text attempting to indoctrinate you into the veritable cult that is hating homosexuality. You can ignore the messages just fine, even give pithy, bored responses to ones that are particular attention-grabbing, and generally act uncaring about the whole business, but it still hurts you on some intrinsic level all the same.

Which is weird, undeniably. None of the people in the chatrooms are talking about you; you are simply an unbiased bystander, looking to broaden your knowledge on a particular topic you had been unaware of until very recently. None of the rhetoric they spew is in any way related to something about you, so caring about it past a point of generalized sympathy is as unproductive as it is just plain weird.

You do your best to quash these feelings when they arise. They really are unproductive; once time you have to take a full forty five minute break from research because one user starts detailing all the things he would do to his son should he reveal himself as gay. Needless to say, the list is long and varied and it takes every atom of self restraint you have not to punch a hole through your computer; you opt for walking laps around your room instead, breathing in and out through your nose very loudly. You know you're being irrational, getting this upset. You're being stupid, and you're over-involving yourself in things that don't even directly concern you.

You stop in the center of your room, fold your arms, and release one last measured exhale.

Not your problem, you remind yourself, and get back to work.

.:.

You are going to be a writer when you grow up.

The path is a little more complex than that—first you have to get through middle school, presuming that's a thing your mother is even going to bother with; next is every American teen's worst nightmare: high school. After that, presuming the whole grisly affair doesn't kill you within the first few months, you will probably go somewhere very far away for college, wherein which you will major in English, or whatever it is specifically that people study when they want to write for the rest of their lives, and then graduate at some juncture. The point is, you are going to be a writer, no doubt about it.

It’s not so much your competency that drives this passion—though you can safely say your grasp of the English language is far above that of most children your age—but a love for it, a real, honest-to-God genuine love that feels both foreign and exhilarating to you whenever you think about it. Few things make you happier than sitting down, opening your journal, and just writing. Writing about yourself, writing about your family, writing about what you did that day. Writing stories, both of the short and long variation—you have one particular work that’s currently filled up four journals cover to cover. Writing about the things you research, writing about the celebrities you watch on TV, writing out the concepts you glean from your endless rereads of the DSM-V and Freud’s collected works. Writing about anything and everything you can get your hands on.

Your mother gets so drunk it almost kills her, and it’s you who has to call the ambulance, you who has to tell the doctors what happened, you who has to politely decline the rehab leaflets they try and press into your hands because you know your mother will only dump them in the trash the second she sees them; you write about it as soon as it’s over. You write about the people in the chatrooms you can’t help but fighting, even though the issues still concern you personally as little as they did in the beginning. You write about how your best friend is your pet cat, and then he dies, hit by a car as he's headed up the road back to your house. You write about it all. It makes you feel powerful, in control of the things that happen to you. It makes you feel like you’re the one telling the story, and should at any point the narrative get too challenging for you to live through, you can simply turn the page and start fresh.

Which you can’t of course, but it’s nice to think anyways.

One fortunate byproduct of your writing habits has been, of course, an advanced vocabulary. Your mother, in one of her more lucid moments, tells you you sound like you swallowed six different dictionaries; you give her a tight-lipped smile and a curt thanks. But she’s not wrong, though, and her observation pleases you more than you’d care to admit. You like being able to put all your thoughts into words. You like having such a vast expanse of language at your fingertips, ready for you to shape and mold it whenever you want. You like knowing how to say what you want to say.

And yet there are moments where, for all your verbosity, language fail you entirely. There are some concepts that you cannot put to words, and it drives you absolutely insane. Think the anger over the sentiments throwing about in the chatrooms; it is inexplicable not because there is no rationale behind it, but because you simply do not know how to voice the rationale aloud. It sits in your head, heavy and oppressive, but you cannot for the life of you relieve the pressure by writing out why it affects you so. Other times, you will simply be reading material regarding human sexuality and will be overwhelmed with the sensation that you are doing something so incredibly wrong. You are making a mistake, you are being weird, you are exposing yourself to topics you have no business concerning yourself over—you are just doing something wrong. It’s a suffocating, endless feeling; it starts to follow you places, taking up permanent residence in the back of your mind, ready to rear its head the second you even think about researching the subject more.

The lack of reasonable explanation you can give for these feelings—honestly, the lack of _any_ explanation in general makes you want to tear your hair out, basically. You are Rose Lalonde, future bestselling author; how on Earth can you not find a single word in your vocabulary to explain—whatever _this_ feeling is?

But endless ruminating on your lack of ability to explain these feelings does nothing but frustrate you more, so you go for your next best strategy, one tried and tested increasingly more as of late: you simply refuse to think about it anymore.

.:.

Interestingly enough, your first direct encounter with women confronting their less-than-heterosexual feelings, so to speak, is not in the textual research you’ve been doing, but through a random paperback you found lying around your bookshelf one day.

It’s not even a good book. Actually, it’s awful, and you are in the middle of a very strenuous mental debate as to whether you should see the thing or to its conclusion or throw it down the garbage disposal when—

Well, when _it_ happens. Two females characters, both of middling importance who you have focused on only vaguely throughout the course of the story, who you have discerned hold nothing important for both you yourself and the overall plot in general—kiss.

They kiss. On the lips. There’s a shocking amount of prose dedicated to the action given the two girls’ relative unimportance to the plot, exactly three paragraphs, to be specific. Three whole paragraphs.

One time when you were four or five, maybe, you dropped your mother’s phone in the toilet and it short circuited, hardwire blowing out the instant the it sank under the water to rest on the furnace elf the porcelain bowl. There had even been some minor sparking.

You are suddenly entirely aware of what that must have felt like to be that phone.

It’s like a switch flicks on in the uppermost corner of your brain; every single sense you have is suddenly turned on to the max, hyperaware of everything around you, of the book in your hands, the lines of text on the page, the two girls kissing. You have to close your eyes for a second and take some deep breaths. Two girls kissing. _Kissing._

It’s not a foreign concept to you, certainly. By now, you have thoroughly researched practically everything there is online about homosexuality, and though the research and material was often skewed towards male homosexuality, females featured to a degree of prominence in what you learnt. You are aware that, somewhere out in this vast and impervious universe, two girls have kissed each other. Maybe even more than once. The idea is far from groundbreaking—of _course_ girls can be gay too; this isn’t a novel concept to you, for God’s sake—but there is something about seeing it so directly in front of you that makes you feel—well, a lot. It makes you feel a lot, and you do not know the names of any of the emotions in the slightest.

Goddamnit. Might as well throw out the whole English language while you’re at it.

Before you’ve even finished rereading the section, the familiar feeling of wrongness starts to kick back up again, filling your head so suddenly you swear you vision almost whites out. Suddenly you feel inexplicably uncomfortable, as if you’ve just been caught in the act of something incredibly embarrassing, and you close the book with a snap, setting it down beside you.

You know—God, you know women can be homosexual. Lesbians. That’s the official term for it. This is not some earth-shattering revaluation to you. Women can be gay and they can do all the things such sexual orientation would entail. It is entirely a feasible course of action for some. You know this.

It’s just— _odd_ to consider it on a real level, stripped bare of textbook language and 20th century psychoanalysis jargon. The notion feels much more real, much more tangible, and—oh, _God_ , it’s back, the wrongness is back just like that, filling your whole body until you’re up on your feet, pacing around, dragging your hands through your hair, grimacing.

You need to stop caring about this. You give the book, still lying on your bed beside where you were sitting, a long, almost angry look and turn away, resuming your path around your room. This is not—it’s just not applicable to you, and you feel like you’re verging dangerously into the territory of thinking it is.

You chew on your thumbnail for a moment, exhaling slowly. This is not applicable to you. Of course it isn’t. Just because the other options are there doesn’t mean you’re going to take them, or that you even want to in the first place. You don’t. That’s the end of it, plain and simple.

You put an indefinite moratorium on your human sexuality research. Your stow your copy of _Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality_ in the corner of one of your bookshelves and do your best to never think about it again. As for the novel, you don’t throw it down the garbage disposal, but you do throw it away in the dumpster around the back of your house. Perhaps it’s something of an overreaction, but every time you think about the kiss enclosed in its pages, your skin feels like it’s about to crawl off your body. The book’s mere presence in your life is a distraction, and you have no time for such indulgences.

Better to table this whole thing now before it becomes— _something_. It’s an easy line to tell yourself, and you repeat it to yourself whenever necessary. Table this now. It’s not applicable. Just forget about it.

.:.

You are eleven years old when you meet Jade Harley.

By now, unrestrained internet access combined with a total lack of face-to-face human interaction outside of your tutors and your mother—and, really, you have a hard time classifying the latter as genuine interactions at the best of times—mean that you spent more time on your computer than off it. Much of it is endless trawling through resources on whatever random subject holds your fancy at the moment—in the absence of Jaspers, Wikipedia has quickly become your new best friend—but you gradually branch out, figuring that if you’re going to live like this for the nest seven years, you might as well try and make some friends out of it.

The two of you meet on a Warrior Cats forum, which should probably embarrass you a lot more than it does. Truthfully, the overall wonder of meeting Jade in the first place rather makes every other extenuating circumstance pale in comparison. She is, simply put, like no one you have ever met before. She is so far removed from the dreary monotony of upstate New York, of the pristine furniture and cold silences of your home, the somewhat tired academia you cling to so desperately. She lives on an uninhabited island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with nothing but her dog and her grandfather—who might be dead; she’s never really explicit about that—to keep her company. She does not go to school and basically lives in the jungle for large stretches of time, broken up only by her returning to her house so she can tend to her garden or build satellites from scratch, whatever her mood is that day. She knows how to operate every type of gun imaginable. She wears an assortment of brightly-colored rubber bands all over her fingers because her grandfather told her it was a way to remember her dreams when she was younger. She wants to be an astrophysicist when she grows up, which you are convinced she could do easily; in your humble opinion, she is smarter than at least half the staff at NASA combined, easily, and will probably discover aliens years before anyone else, or something equally impressive. She like you in her love for animals, her love for reading, and the solitude she has grown up in and unlike you virtually every other way: she is energetic and effervescent, bubbly and talkative and so unreservedly compassionate it floors you. She loves to talk, loves to tell stories of her unconventional upbringing and the island she calls home, but she also listens to you. She wants to listen to you.

For all your penchant for telling stories, your commitment to becoming an author, you aren’t all that used to being listened to. It’s a rare feeling, and one you want to trap in a box and store safely away forever.

Scratch that. You want to trap Jade in a box and store her safely away forever. Metaphorically speaking, of course; she self-admits to not doing well with staying in one place for long when she can avoid it. Rather she just establishes herself as your friend—your best friend, probably—in record timing, and if you think about this for any duration of time, it makes you so obscenely happy you feel like you might pass out.

And that’s only half-hyperbole. Seriously, Jade Harley does things to you. Where you would once spend hours listlessly going through school work you could have completed in thirty minutes, you now breeze through your other obligations—even voluntarily getting through some of the chores you hadn’t done in months—so you can spend more time talking to her. You are more energetic, more talkative, more civil with your mother, though the post-it note war on the fridge is still far from over. You go outside more. You have finally have something tangible to look forward to every day, and it doesn’t even bother you in the slightest that you find yourself killing hours and hours of time talking to Jade instead of doing something more productive. As far as you’re concerned, talking to her is productive—it’s the most productive way you’ve ever spent your time, and even if it isn’t, you simply do not care. 

Sometimes you wonder if you should be worried about this, the inexorable way she just comes into your life and turns everything around with a few well-timed messages and stories told over video call that make your cheeks hurt from smiling. You wonder if you are perhaps moving too fast into this friendship. You worry the there is a sort of protocol to these things, a sort of set of rules everyone must follow when they make a new friend, and you are somehow not adhering to them. You worry you are becoming too—attached to Jade, in a way. Too enamored by her presence. Too emotionality reliant on her. You have never been one for codependency, and you doubt you are starting up that practice now, but you also cannot deny the fact that the days you talk to Jade are far better than the ones you don’t. 

Most of all, you worry that perhaps you like her too much. 

You tell yourself that’s stupid, though. Jade is the closest friend you’ve had for as long as you can remember; of course you’re going to get close with her. Of course you’re going to care about her. Of course the days you talk to her will be better than those you don’t—you’re bored out of your mind on the latter. It all makes perfect, logical sense when you think about it.

And besides, you oddly feel as if something in the universe has lined up perfectly in order to bring you and Jade together despite the entire expanse of the United States and half the Pacific Ocean separating the two of you, and questioning it feels like you are inviting the powers that be to come and ruin it. And within mere days, the notion of not being friends with Jade is so incomprehensible that you don’t want to risk it, not even in the slightest.

.:.

By some miracle of force, the school in your nearest town has a bus that can pick you up and drop you off only ten minutes away from your house, so you make a triumphant entry into the foray of the American public schooling system as the time to start middle school rolls around. In general, school is as boring and uninteresting as you assumed it would be, and seeing so many people every day after years of veritable solitude is jarring for a long while, but you do make one crucial discovery right off the bat: you just hate boys. 

Not in a deeply personal sense; though you are all too aware of the innumerable injustices women face at the hands of men all across the world day after day after day, you have grown up sheltered enough to be spared the worst of it. They are there, though— _the chat rooms,_ you think occasionally when you forget that those are the sorts of things you don’t let yourself think about anymore—and hard to avoid even at the best of times. But it is not this general discontentment with society that spurns the realization; instead it is the two months and fifteen days you have spent in sixth grade. Rather depressingly enough, there are a number of boys there alongside you, and you are forced to interact with a great many of them, whether it be by simple proximity or because some of them actually go out of their way to try and engage with you.

And, God, if those aren’t the worst moments of your life, you don’t know what is. Okay, strictly speaking, that is both melodramatic and untrue—you do know what the worst moment of your life has been, and it involves a lot of empty vodka bottles and a very silent drive to the hospital in an ambulance—but it is easy to pinpoint your prepubescent male classmates as the sole worst thing to ever descend upon this Earth alongside you, so you do it with glee.

They are just so unbelievably stupid. That’s the main issue, you think; none of them have even the vaguest modicum of emotional intelligence squirreled away somewhere. They are dense with a determination that would be impressive were it not easily the most aggravating thing you had ever encountered. Conversing with them is like talking to brick walls, if brick walls could somehow manage to scream at peak volume and rattle off deeply insensitive turns of phrases between every other statement they make. 

Jade’s friends—who quickly become your friends, too—John and Dave are, you suppose, manageable. John is actually quite sweet, and you immediately frame him as the exception to your newfound distaste for the male population. Dave is not even within the same vein as sweet, and likes to make this fact as clear as possible, but it is more tolerable through a screen than encountering it in person every day. When his commentary gets a little too similar to what you hear in the halls between classes you can simply ignore him until he calms down. Or you can chew him out, sending him paragraph after paragraph detailing exactly why everything he is saying is as incorrect as it is insensitive until he finally relents, offering up a generally insincere but nevertheless satisfactory sorry. 

Sometimes the pithy debates spiral into much more heated arguments, and you find yourself swapping paragraphs of impassioned-sounding rhetoric for biting lines of text that you sometimes can’t help but cringe reading over the next day, but he’s always the one to back down, offering up much more genuine apologies. You like that he’s like that, always willing to bow out first; it makes it so you never have to consider the fact that you might take it too far sometimes.

Because you don’t, not really. Boys are just _dumb_. They are dumb and insensitive and generally horrible beings, and while you can restrain yourself from pointing this out at random, if someone is going to shove those qualities in your face with abandon, you do not intend to sit idly by and let them do so without commentary.

You don’t really care that this makes you one of the more unpopular people in your grade. You are well aware of what is said about you behind your back, and you suppose that if you gave it the time of day, sat down and absorbed each of the remarks and comments thrown your way, you would find yourself notably less apathetic to the notion of being a generally disliked individual. 

So you don’t. You tell yourself it’s as simple as that, and just don’t. 

.:.

Where boys are maddening with their emotional unintelligence, the girls at your school are infuriating for an entirely different reason, and it’s made all the more worse by the fact that you cannot put words to what said reason is. Not in the slightest.

God, if this is how things are going to, maybe _you_ should consider a career in astrophysics.

For a while, you think that maybe everyone is just stupid—such is the inevitable curse of middle school, you assume—and that's what’s bothering you, but it doesn’t hold up. When it comes to the girls, there is none of the deep set apathy you feel when one of the boys in your English class will spit out _fucking feminazi_ at you under his breath; there is none of the panicked disgust you feel when one of your classmates tries to ask you to the back-to-school dance; there is none of the feelings of dry irritation when Dave says something fantastically stupid, and your first though invariably is: Jade wouldn’t say something like that.

No, there is none of that, and you almost wish there was. Those feelings are familiar by now; if they were books, their covers would be faded and torn with age, the pages dog-eared, stained with coffee and smudged ink. The feelings when dealing with the girls at your school—or even just existing in the same stratosphere as them—are new and fresh and head-achingly awful. They are distracting, tripping you up at the most bizarre of moments. You are playing dodgeball in gym class one day and pause to watch the girl next to you as she shakes her hair over her shoulder and hurls her ball clear across the room in one clean, fluid motion, grinning as she does so. You are so immersed in the picture before you that you don’t even notice a ball sailing towards you until it hits you in the face—literally. The girl you were watching turns to you, asking if you’re okay, eyes alight with worry, and you are so at loss for words that you just turn and leave, heading to the bench while silently plotting a route to the roof of the gym so you can get up there and throw yourself off it as soon as possible.

It’s not the feelings being vague and undeterminable that’s the worst thing, although that is as frustrating as ever, helpfully enough; it’s how they make you act. You pride yourself on your composure, your cool head, your assurance, and these are not fictitious traits. You have faced down your mother's heart nearly stopping on more than one occasion, been the person to dial 911, gotten back home by yourself while she stayed at the hospital, listening to doctors discuss twelve-step plans she would never follow through with. You have done all of this and never broken once. You’ve compartmentalized the memories away too much for you to remember how much you were panicking in them, but you know for a fact that you never let it show. You remained cool, calm, and collected, everything your mother inadvertently taught you to be.

But a girl asks if you are okay and it’s like you’ve never spoken to another human being before. The lack of control suddenly vested upon you unnerves you as much as it frustrates you. You feel stupid and silly and generally incompetent in those moments, so you strive to make them as infrequent of occurrences as possible. 

You settle for establishing yourself as the most unapproachable person at school for both girls and boys alike now. Needless to say, you make very few friends as a result. Exactly none would be a more accurate number, but you can’t find it in yourself to care. Much. You have Jade, who is generally just lovely and wonderful and never seems to notice if some of your replies take longer—much longer—to formulate than others. You have John, who is amusing and carefree in a way that makes you feel a little more comfortable with at least pretending to be the latter as well. And you have Dave who, despite his mind-numbing idiocy, is funny and kind in his own roundabout, deeply ironic way, and still someone you care for deeply. They are all you need, so you put the girls at your school and your inability to connect with them like a functioning person as far from your mind as possible. You order yourself to refrain from thinking about them as much as you do. It’s weird and unproductive, you think. It’s unbecoming.

It’s wrong. It’s still wrong, and you still can’t handle it. You remind yourself of this whenever you feel yourself slipping sideways, so to speak; you tell yourself, point blank, to stop.

And it works. Most of them time.

.:.

You are sitting in homeroom, eyes trained firmly on a boom and attention as far removed from the cluster of your classmates behind you discussing God-knows what in obnoxiously loud whispers as possible when you become distantly aware of someone saying your name.

“Lalonde.” It’s a boy’s voice, squeaky in all its prepubescent glory, and you resist the suddenly overwhelming urge to bang your head against your desk. “Hey, Lalonde.”

You do not close the book, nor do you give any indication that you heard the boy—you think his name is Jeremy and you’re only moderately certain that he is in at least two of your other classes— behind you. It isn’t even eight o'clock yet; you are not a morning person at the best of times, and one of your idiot classmates trying to engage in what will undoubtedly be some pathetic attempt at verbally one-upping you on his part lends absolutely nothing towards making this one of the aforementioned _best of times_. Not even remotely. 

“Lalonde,” maybe-Jeremy calls again, a bite to his voice, and you feel a crumpled-up piece of paper bounce against the back of your head, landing on the ground at your feet with a small cranking noise. Behind you, a chorus of snickers kicks up.

Honestly, it should be a federal crime to be this fucking annoying. 

“What?” you say, still not turning around. You’re worried that if you do, you might be tempted to throw your book right between his eyes. “Do you need something?”

“You gotta crush on someone?”

Oh, my god. This is a joke. This actually has to be a joke.

“Nope.” You turn a page with particular viciousness.

“C’mon, Lalonde. Everyone has a crush. Who’s the lucky dude?”

“No one, tragically.” You turn another page despite having processed approximately none of the words on the last one. Oh, well. The book wasn’t very good, anyways. “Though I do hate to dash your hopes like that, believe me. Don’t feel too bad about it, though; I’m sure there’s a lady somewhere out there both blind and brain-dead enough to consider potential romantic entrapments with you as a viable option for her future life plans.”

To your mild disappointment, this incites no visceral reaction from maybe-Jeremy; from a number of conversations you have had within the same vein as this, you have rapidly discovered that preteen boys are bizarrely sensitive to the idea of them remaining single for extended periods of times. It’s the funny bone of male insecurities, and you enjoy bashing it against corners whenever you can. If they’re going to be a dick to you, you figure you might as well return the favor with vigor. 

But maybe-Jeremy does not rise to the bait; in fact, you swear you hear him snort a little, and the smile in his voice is all-too evident when he speaks next. 

“Lucky lady?”

And, just like that, your whole body goes cold.

“C’mon, Lalonde,” he says, still talking, and you are very glad you hadn’t turned around when he started talking; there is not enough self-restraint in the entire world to prevent you from breaking his nose should it be even vaguely within the line of your vision. “I mean, everyone kinda knows you’re a huge fucking le—”

You slam the book shut, pushing your chair back and standing up in the same motion. You feel oddly as if there is a billion bees trapped inside your body, careening aimlessly around your insides, fighting to get out. It takes a concentrated effort to keep your voice deadly steady as you, still not looking, address maybe-Jeremy over your shoulder.

“I’m not,” you say—snap, really, with a viciousness that shocks even you. “But thanks for your concern.”

It’s still ten minutes to your first class, but you have decidedly had enough of homeroom, so you storm out of the room in the most dignified manner, forcing your hands steady as you shut the classroom door a title harder than necessary behind you. 

_Everyone kinda knows you’re a huge fucking le—_

No. You shake your head involuntarily as you march down the hallway. _No_. You’re _not_. You aren’t a fucking—you’re just not.

 _Say it,_ taunts a voice in the back of your head, a sneer dripping from its fabricated voice, sending a chill up your spine. _Come on, Lalonde. Say it._

You shake your head again, gritting your teeth, and turn down another hallway. Your boots squeak against the linoleum, black on white, as you storm down to the end of the corridor, finding the first empty classroom you can and pushing the door open. Kicking the door shut behind you, you toss your bag down on the floor and lean against one of the desks, pressing your willfully steady fingertips into your eyes. 

You aren’t. You force an exhale out, moving to massage your temples. You aren’t, you aren’t, you fucking _aren’t_. Acknowledging the rampant stupidity of all the boys in your grade doesn’t make you that. Erring on the side of being antisocial doesn’t make you that. Getting flustered on the occasion doesn’t make you that. Literally nothing about you makes you that because you aren’t and that is just how things are. You know this. God, you spent a solid three months researching the ins and outs of human sexuality; if there was even the barest hint of homosexuality within you, you’re pretty damn certain you would’ve cottoned onto it by now. There really is no more debate on the matter.

As you calm down, your breathing returning to a steady tempo, you start to cringe a little at your response to that whole ordeal. Undoubtedly, you have exposed this particular topic as an area of somewhat sensitivity to your classmates, which they will no doubt use as ammo for this convoluted quest of theirs in getting you to snap, or whatever, but it’s really no matter. If anyone brings it up again, you’ll probably just punch them in the face. You have yet to instigate your first brawl, and it seems like it would be fun. Certainly would do maybe-Jeremy to get himself knocked down a few pegs, at least.

No, your discomfort isn’t stemming from the publicness of your reaction; it’s stemming from the outright vehemence of your reaction to maybe-Jeremy’s insinuation. Then unbridled fear mingled with skin-crawling discomfort that had just slammed into you was—unexpected, to say the least.

Because, okay, look—you are not homophobic. You know this as much as you know anything else; again, if you had any adversity to the concept of homosexuality in whatever ground possible, you know your months and months of research would have uncovered it. You are not barbaric, nor are you an idiot; you refuse to live in the 20th century about these sorts of things. To you, an individual being homosexual is as inherent as any other characteristic; treating them negatively in any way for it would be like hating someone for having blue eyes, or brown hair, and the idea of you even thinking like that is practically laughable. 

You are not homophobic.

But you are not homosexual, either. You just aren’t. You know this as much as you know anything else, too. Yes, you are aware of the other options; yes, you are aware that, were you, you would not run the risk of getting thrown out on the street or jumped while walking home; yes, you are aware that, day by day, society becomes more tolerant of variance in sexuality, and you would undeniably find a social sphere in which you could comfortably operate as your true self without much backlash. You are aware of all of this.

But you are also aware of yourself, more so than anything, really. You pride yourself on the depths of understanding you hold in regards to your character; the idea that one of the fundamentally unintelligent dickheads in your grade would know your own sexuality better than you do is quite frankly, fucking hysterical.

You are not homosexual. You accept individuals who are in totality, but that is not you. And yours is a fair reaction to have when people who don’t know the first thing about you start insinuating such characteristics; it’s offensive not in the label, but in their presumption. Yes, that’s it. It’s the sheer _presumption_ that got to you back there, nothing more.

You let out a sigh, the last of the tension that had worked it’s way around you dissolving at your feet, and scrape your back up from the ground. You give your head a little shake, brushing the whole incident under the rug with a decisive sweep, and push the door open, reentering the hallways like nothing ever happened. 

.:.

You first Skype Jade after about six months of you two being friends—at this point, you have done so with both John and Dave on multiple occasions—and, soon enough, just like with the two boys, your calls with her start to become a frequent occurrence. Before you realize it, you two are communicating via video at least once a week. The time zones are a little challenging to manage, especially when she spends most of her day traipsing around the wilderness with little to no cell service, but you find yourself more than willing to accommodate by simply staying up to wait until she gets back home. Most days, it will be twelve, one, two in the morning before she’s able to call you, the face popping up on your screen still streaked with dirt, hair peppered with stray leaves and what looks like entire sticks sometimes. 

_“Rose,”_ she’ll say when she notices the time for you, dragging out the ‘o’ in your name, a whine to her voice you find embarrassingly endearing. “It’s so late for you. _C’mon.”_

“Sleep is for the weak,” you will say, invariably, and she’ll scoff at that, rolling her eyes in the exact way you’ve come to understand denotes fondness on her part. It always makes you ridiculously happy to get these sorts of reactions from her. 

Most of the time, the two of you will just talk, her more than you. It’s not due to lack of verbal control on her part; rather, you just enjoy listening to her. She has a way of telling stories that is deeply enthralling as it is amusing, and you are convinced listening to Jade Harley detail what she did that day down to the minute is infinitely more interesting than any book you could ever get your hands on. Certainly there is no shortage of material on her part to discuss; where you are cooped up for days on end, only venturing outside to make the trek down to the town center to get groceries or to wander around the woods surrounding your house for a few hours, she practically lives outdoors, spending her entire day wandering around the island she calls home, exploring dense forests and hidden caverns, Becquerel at her heels, adventure at every turn.

“Honestly,” she tells you one time, scrubbing at her glasses with the hem of her shirt. “I really only come inside to, like, eat and talk to you.”

You know she means _you_ in the general sense, encompassing Dave and John as well, but you cannot bite back the grin that rises to your face at the statement nevertheless. 

At the times when she foregoes her own ramblings to prompt you into talking, you will tell her stories. You do not live the life of mystery and adventure she does; someone like her would probably be bored half to death after listening to you talk about your own home for even five minutes, so you substitute reality for fiction. You tell her whatever scenario comes to mind first; the plots are shabby and the characterization leaves much to be desired, but you can hardly care about such trifling matters when Jade is smiling at you like that. 

“Are you gonna be a writer when you grow up?” she asks you once, chin propped up on her arms, still smiling.

You are thinking very hard about how the light behind her makes the edges of her hair turn pure golden, and it takes you a second to formulate a response. “I think so, yes.” You duck you head, staring at your keyboard for a second. “Though it always feels very childish to say.”

You can feel Jade frowning at this. “’S not childish at all, silly. You’re so good at telling stories; I bet you’re an amazing writer, too.”

“You think?” 

“I _know.”_

“You haven’t read anything I’ve written.”

It’s true. She hasn’t. Not from lack of asking—because she has asked, only about a billion and one times—but because you are so terrified that she will, for some reason, hate whatever you send her. Proud as you may be, you can handle criticism regarding your work, but something about the idea of Jade not liking the things you write makes you feel cold on the inside.

Jade just sits up, stretching back, and you watch the column of her throat shift as she cracks her neck. “Doesn’t matter,” she says, matter-of-factly as she pressed her face into her arms. “I know you are. You’re gonna sell so many books when you grow up and I’m gonna buy, like, all of them.”

You are not blushing. You are definitely not blushing, because that would be stupid. That would be stupid and weird, _Lalonde_ , get it together. “I thought there weren’t any stores around you?”

She considers this for a second, head tipping to the side. “There aren’t. But it’s not like I’m gonna live here forever.” Jade’s face breaks into another beaming grin. “Maybe I’ll move to New York and live with you. We can get a cool house somewhere with a nice garden and you can be a writer and I can study space and physics and stuff!”

“And pets,” you remind her. Your whole body feels warm and tingly. “We cannot forget the pets.”

Jade mock-slaps herself on the forehead. “Ugh, how could I forget the pets?”

You laugh, softly, and then allow yourself a vocalization of something undeterminable—sentimentality, maybe? Excitement?—for a second. “That sounds admittedly quite nice.” Then, worrying all of a sudden that that was the wrong thing to say, you backtrack. “That seems a few years away, though. I suppose you’ll just have to put up with my relentless video calls until then.”

Jade looks at you, suddenly serious, and a foreign stab of panic shoots straight through you. “Rose,” she says, meeting your gaze through the camera; her eyes are wide and green, the poor quality of the video still not enough to remove the little flecks of gold and hazel you can see in them. “You never bother me.”

You just drop your gaze again. There’s something about the way Jade is looking at you that’s making your head spin. 

“Seriously, Rose.” And she sounds a little sad now, and you’re wrenching your eyes back up to her. She’s still locking eyes with you, demeanor intense, brow a little furrowed. “Okay?”

You allow yourself a smile—to reassure her, you tell yourself, because you know she is virtually all alone on that island, and you do not want to scare her into thinking that one of her best friends is planning on dropping off the face of the Earth so as to not run the risk of annoying her, because that isn’t even remotely true. Seriously, you would take feeling like the most obnoxious person on the planet every day of your life so long as Jade never had to feel alone. “Okay, Jade. Okay.”

.:.

Through careful observation of your peers at school and the figures you have seen in the media you consume in your own time, you have reached several key determinations regarding female friendship. 

For starters, open displays of affection are much more commonplace, even going so far as to be encouraged. You have yet to observe the habit of prefacing any genuine display of emotion between friends with the prerogative “no homo” that is so common in relationships between males, specifically teenage boys. Rather it is much more socially acceptable to openly display affection within female friendships. It would not be uncommon to let this affection err on the side of physical, too; though, of course, there are the constraints of keeping things within the loosely-defined boundaries of platonic, physical contact such as hugging, playing with each other’s hair, and hand holding would not be seen as especially bizarre between two females, so long as they were well established to be simply friends. 

This affection is transmitted through the way female friends address each other; while males might be more inclined to keep their conversations punctuated with verbal, and sometimes physical, takedowns of one another—likely in attempts to reassert their masculinity and dominance over the situation wherever possible—females seem less inclined to partake in such affairs; that is not to say you haven’t witnessed conflict within infra-female relationships—because you have, to varying degrees of viciousness and violence—but rather to say that societal norms dictate such behavior is more unbecoming. leave it to the boys to brawl it out in the hallways, against lockers; the girls should have the dignity to resolve their fights in controlled manners, if not have any in the first place.

It is a deeply unfair double standard, but not one you allow yourself much time to ponder over. Not by willful intention; rather, whenever you turn this line of thinking over in your mind, you always stumble over the assessments regarding physical affection and find it invariably challenging to get back up again. 

Because something your time spent observing has _not_ told you is to what levels of physical contact and affection it is appropriate for you to desire in your friendships with other girls. Jade specifically. 

And sometimes you will call her and the ever-present light behind her will catch the back of her head in a way that makes it light up like there’s a halo around it, and all you are able to think for several moments following this is how much you want to run your hands through her hair. She will laugh as some stupid joke you crack and you will get the desire to hug her so strong it makes you dizzy. You will watch her sometimes as she works in her lab, shouting jokes at you over the sound of grating metal, carting huge piles of scrap-metal or ammunition boxes or stacks of books to and fro; you become immersed in the way the well-utilized muscles in her shoulders and arms and neck tense up just so, and you find yourself thinking—

Whatever. The point is, you think about it a lot. And you’re entirely willing to tack it up to simple proximity—after all, she is your only real female friend, and you’re not about to start going around playing with John or Dave’s hair, are you?—but sometimes you try not sure if that quite covers it.

But there arises the issue: if proximity can not explain the strange rushes of affection you sometimes feel for your friend, your _good_ friend, then what can?

And, more directly to the point, what on earth are you supposed to do about it?

.:.

About a week and a half before John’s birthday, two things of relative monumentality happen in quick succession that leave you utterly reeling.

The first is a bizarre Pesterchum conversation you have with Dave at around one in the morning. It was following one of your movie nights with John that have since expanded to include Jade and Dave, the four of you all calling on Skype and then watching the movie play out from John’s screen. Naturally, it had been a shockingly awful Nic Cage film he had already made you watch about five times before, so you could not resist biting commentary where it was due—and assuredly enough, it was _very_ due—and John apparently could not resist bantering right back with you, starting up some repartee that lasted for the course of the entire movie. 

To you, such proceedings were entirely common; you love giving John shit for his taste in movies, and he loves teasing you right back. It had been a fundamental of your relationship with him since day one; an entirely normal, unassuming fundamental you had never thought to question. 

But it still takes Dave less than five minutes after movie night finishes to message you about it.

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] \--

TG: what was all that shit with you and egbert in the chat

TT: What?

TG: cmon man do not play dumb with me right now 

TG: you werent even trying to be subtle

TG: i could see the heart eyes all the way from texas

TG: seriously like those motherfuckers broke into my house and just beat me within an inch of my life thats how obvious they fuckin were

TT: Heart eyes?

TT: What are you talking about?

TG: holy shit dude

TG: you and egbert flirting like theres no tomorrow 

TG: you got the hots for him now

TG: because as your bffsie i feel like there are certain developments you should be keeping me posted on 

TG: and wanting to mack on john fucking egbert is sort of one them 

The ice-cold discomfort that shoots through you as what Dave is insinuating finally sinks in almost leaves you breathless. You actually freeze, curled up against your headboard, laptop gripped your hand so hard the edges of the screen bite into your palm as you stare at the lines of red on your screen, trying to fully wrap your brain around Dave’s comments.

The disbelief burns away into acute anger in record timing; it takes all of your restraint not to message Dave back that second, telling him to go fuck himself sideways into the Rio Grande, which in itself such a disproportionate reaction to what you know is simply harmless ribbing on his part that you find yourself cycling right back into another bout of confused disbelief. You are not entirely sure why someone having the impression that you want to _mack on_ John is so deeply repulsive to you, but it is. It’s not for lack of attractiveness your friend has—as far as soon-to-be thirteen year old boys go, John is not horrible, both in visage and personality, but—no. Just, _no_. _No_ so definitely, so vehemently it surprises you, but _no_ all the same.

TT: Though it may be something of a novel concept to you, it is entirely possible for two individuals of the opposite sex to have a relationship that is not solely formed on the basis of them wishing to procreate.

TT: And the insinuation you’re making that I only interact with John — my friend John, who has been so for several years now — because I desire or am expecting some sort of physical compensation from him is narrow-minded and offensive and honestly so moronic I’m not even going to justify it with proper response. 

TT: Good night.

\-- tentacleTherapist [TT] is an idle chum! --

The second thing happens a few days later while you are on call with Jade. She is finishing up her recount of what she's done that day, and you are focusing very hard on looking engaged, but not stupidly so, when you start to pick up on a shift in her demeanor. She keeps talking, but you can hear a tension to her words now, an imperceptible layer of strain coating everything she says. She looks more nervous than you’ve ever seen her, pulling at the bands around her fingers, not looking you in the eyes like she normally does. A funny sort of worry stirs in the pit of your stomach.

“Is everything okay?” you ask when there’s a lapse in the conversation.

She frowns some more, chewing her lip. “Can I tell you something kind of stupid?”

“Of course.”

“And you promise you won’t get mad?”

The worry intensifies. “Of course, Jade.” Then, before you can think too much about it. “You can tell me anything. You know that, right?”

It sounds embarrassing to say out loud, but the brief relief that flickers across your friend’s face is enough to make you get over it quickly. She chews her lip for a second longer before replying. “You know Dave?”

You nod. The worry is starting to condense into something much heavier.

“I think I like him.”

It’s like someone flicks a switch; one second you are sitting on your bed, steady as can be, and then next you feel, oddly and distinctly, like you are falling into nothingness. The room around you shifts out of focus as the bed beneath you opens up, sending you plummeting down some sort of endless abyss; you only half-manage to think well, this all feels very fucking overblown as you hurtle through the darkness, and—

“Rose?”

Oh, right. The room rematerializes around you with a jarring snap, and Jade’s concerned face swims back into your main line of focus. There is a smudge of dirt across the bridge of her nose, brown on brown, obscuring her smattering of freckles there. A strand of hair has come undone from her ponytail, falling into her face. She looks—well, she looks how you imagine any thirteen year old girl might look when they’ve just told their best friend about the boy they like: hesitant, worried, a little excited. 

“Alright,” you finally say, hoping your voice doesn’t sound as strained as you're starting to feel; you’re no longer falling, but you do have a distinct sensation that something is starting to break apart in the center of your chest, piece by jagged piece. “Well, I’m sure that he—he reciprocates in some capacity. Have you talked to him about it?”

She blinks at you, eyes wide behind her glasses. “You’re—okay with it?”

 _No_ , you think, so suddenly, so vehemently it shocks you. You shove that down and slam a lid on it, _hard_. You have no idea where that came from. “Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?” 

“I thought you liked him,” Jade says, finally. “You two always seem so—well, you know, and i just thought—”

_Oh._

You‘re not at all sure what to do in response to that, so you just shake your head, perhaps a little harder than necessary. “No,” you say. _“God_ , no. Not at all.”

Her face splits into a grin so wide it makes your heart clench, and you can practically feel the tension dissolving within her. And then she’s off, a tirade about subtle flirtations and late-night conversations and _dropping hints into sinkholes_ and what could very well be a million other things you will never come close to understanding falling from her lips. You sit there, nodding at the right intervals and laughing at others, looking as engaged as always.

And you are—it’s Jade; how could you not be?—but in your head, you are also reminding yourself of one crucial fact over and over again: that Jade Harley is your friend. That Jade Harley has always been your friend, your _best_ friend, absolutely nothing more, and you should share in this excitement she has over having a crush. You should revel in it as she does; at the very least, you should pull your head out of your ass and support her and her romantic overtures with Dave Strider. You should be happy for her right now.

Why on earth would you _not?_

The question looms in your head, a daunting, chilling figure. You feel oddly as if you are stumbling into a trap, or teetering on the edge of a precipice, inches from falling to your death, and it is overwhelming and heart-stopping and terrifying. 

You do not understand this. Suddenly, you do not understand a single thing you’re feeling, and you hate it. You hate it so, so much. 

So you do what you do best: you compartmentalize, furiously so. You shove the feelings away, stuff them into a small metal box and lock it, then carry the box down a metal flight of stairs to a basement room in the back of your brain, drop it in a corner, head back up the steps, and shut the door at the top with a definitive _bang_.

That’s the end of that.

.:.

You don’t talk to Jade for two days after that. Every time you go to message her, you feel sick and dizzy, head buzzing with a phantom anger you don’t entirely understand. More to the point, you just don’t know what to say to her; nearly two years of friendship at this point, two years of effortless conversations lasting hours upon hours, two years of never running out of things to say., and you are at a loss for words for the first time with her.

You are being stupid and irrational. You remind yourself of this almost hourly, and it does absolutely nothing but make you feel worse. You know you are, goddamnit; the issue here is you don’t know how to _stop_. The issue here is you don’t know _why_.

No, that’s not it. A buzzer sounds somewhere in the back of your head, mocking you.

The issue is, for the first time in what feels like your entire life, you might have the vaguest, barest, most distant understanding as to why—why you feel like this, why you’ve always felt like this. For the first time, you think you might have an answer.

And it fucking _terrifies_ you. 

.:.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> part 2! fun fact this fic was supposed to be like 10k words and its pushing 40k rn and i havent even finished the end y am i like this...

You are thirteen years old when the world ends. 

Where there was once ceaseless sameness, the never-changing scenery outside your window, the repeated quality each day had, like you were stuck in some sort of time loop, there are now raging fires, meteor strikes, and saving your friends lives. Suddenly, you are consumed with worry over the abrupt disappearance of your mother, with entering Sburb, with learning the ins and out of the bizarre new game. You are consumed by the new and distinct sensation that, despite necessity rather forcing your hand, something very bad is going happen if you and your friends play this game.

You are not consumed by the rapidly devolving situation regarding Jade and Dave—well, devolving for _you_ , at least. You are not consumed by your own briar bush of feelings for the girl. You are not consumed by your briar bush of feelings regarding _any_ girl, ever. 

Because the world is ending, already ended in some places. Because life as you have ever known it has crashed and burned and there is talk among your friends about parallel dimensions and scratches and omniscient unbeatable bosses in the shape of anthropomorphic versions of Becquerel. There is talk about death—real death, death made no less permanent and tangible by the fact that you are supposed to be simply playing a game here—and as each day passes, you start to understand what the notion of _fighting for your lives_ really means.

Perhaps worrying about such nihilistic concepts should concern you, but you honestly cannot find it within yourself to care. At least the end of the world is interesting; finally, the sense of boredom your day-to-day life always gave you has been broken up. Finally, you have something to do. 

And, of course, the end of the world is distracting, too; perhaps a large portion of the area surrounding your house being on fire is not ideal, strictly speaking, nor is the sudden disappearance of your mother, or the strange, neon planet you find yourself dumped on as soon as you enter the game, but if it keeps your mind away from less— _productive_ areas of focus, then who are you complain, really?

Despite this, though, the box you safely stowed away in the depths of your mental basement during that conversation with Jade remains notoriously hard to keep in place. You will return from a day of imp-hunting, or alchemizing, or working on your walkthrough to find it sitting back out in the open, decidedly not forgotten about like you left it. In frustration, you will pick the thing up and deposit it back in the corner of the basement, slamming the door behind you for good measure. Not an hour later, it seems sometimes, and the box is back in the open, staring you down, cutting an impassive, heavy figure in the center of your consciousness; you swear you can almost feel its weight sometimes, dragging you down, making you slow and lethargic and _tired_. 

You give it another look of disgust before mentally booting it down the stairs, this time locking the door behind you before you even hear it hit the ground. You don’t have time for this. You have a game to figure out.

.:.

You try and talk to her when you can. You both have the genuine excuse of being ridiculously busy—you with your gameFAQs and she with whatever she gets up to when she’s asleep—so conversations are few and far between, but you make a concentrated effort to reach out to her when you can.

She is as normal as ever. To her, there has been no shift, no monumental fracturing, no crushing disappointment that she cannot coherently explain. To her, nothing between you two has changed; despite not talking much as of late, you two are still best friends in her eyes. You two are the same as you’ve always been.

It makes you sadder than you can ever hope to articulate.

.:.

You are still thirteen, only a few weeks older, when you finally learn grimAuxiliatrix’s name.

It takes exactly eight searing rounds of back-and-forth, tongue-in-cheek banter for you to get her to disclose such information. By now, the two of you have been talking on and off for several days—weeks? Time passes bizarrely in the Medium—and during that time, you have managed to figure out the general impetus behind the trolls’ conversations with you and your friends: to be as annoying as physically possible.

As a rule, they aren’t always successful. It seems that some of them lack the social graces to properly irritate someone without simultaneously making a fool out of themselves, but some of them do manage to hit the nail on the head. You hear through the grapevine—read: Dave—that Jade and the trolls’ de facto leader, one Karkat Vantas, have been driving each other insane to no end and manage to think _good for them_ with only a little unwarranted bitterness in response. 

Your troll, though has been successful in a way that almost unnerves you. She is not _annoying_ per se, rather she just manages to match your repartee in a way no one you’ve ever spoken to before has; any time she stumbles over her own messages is quickly brushed aside in favor of another barbed comment directed at you that you just cannot help but grinning at. Before long, finding the chinks in her armor quickly becomes your new favorite pastime, and soon this progresses into simply just talking to her. 

Lack of general annoyance aside, you will admit that, in your first few conversations, you might have found her to be disinteresting. Deeply confusing in her perpetual deadpan delivery and seemingly willful misunderstanding of every comment you try to make, at least. But as you quickly adapt to the dynamic between the two of you, adjusting to her particular typing style, her odd witticisms, her biting, dry humor, you find your perspective on her shifting vastly. 

Shifting notably for the better. 

_Kanaya_. That’s her name. _Kanaya Maryam._ It rattles around your head like a loose pinball, and despite your better instinct, you make no efforts to stop it. Instead, you allow yourself to listen to it, absorbing the contrast with the crack of the _K_ and the smooth, flowing vowels that proceed it; you wonder, idly, if there are any troll intonations you’re missing out on here, an accentuation text through a screen doesn’t quite convey, and feel a strange burst of excitement when you remind yourself that, soon enough, you will be meeting in person and you can ask her about it then.

You wonder if the excitement is only to do with being granted the opportunity to get the phonetics of her name down, but that invites a rather tricky line of questioning you don’t want to deal with, so you push that though aside. Back to the name. 

It really is rather a gorgeous name, you have to admit; so what if it floats around your consciousness for some time after learning it? Kanaya is your friend, and there are no written rules saying you cannot appreciate finer aspects of your friends should the situation warrant, and you’ve deiced this situation definitely does. 

After gratuitous cajoling from you— _it is only fair,_ you tell her, _given that you've known exactly what I look like from day one but I have yet to put a face to your name_ —Kanaya Maryam also agrees to fork over a photo of yourself. From what you can ascertain, the image in a screenshot of a video call with another troll. She is in the top left-hand corner, her dark statute contrasting sharply with the explosion of color in the background. The image quality is absolutely horrendous, but you can make out defining features of her all the same: a shock of black hair; a pair of curved horns, one crooking at the end; a grey-toned, angular face.

GA: Satisfied

You spend an inordinate amount of time crafting your next response. 

TT: Kanaya, I can count the number of pixels in that photo on both my hands.

TT: If I was being stringent about it, maybe even just one.

It’s not even a good one. Damnit.

GA: In Alternian Society It Is Typical For One To Respond To Receiving A Gift With The Customary Amount Of Appreciation And Gratitude 

GA: Perhaps You Strange Humans Operate On A Much Different Plane Though

TT: So you consider a poor-quality photo of yourself on par with a gift?

TT: My, my. Don’t look now, but poor Saint Anthony the Great is rolling in his grave.

GA: I Have No Idea Who That Is And Also Find Myself Not Caring Whatsoever

TT: Wow.

TT: As Dave would say, sick burn.

And so forth. 

Kanaya likely dismisses the request as a bizarre human custom and moves on. Indeed, you’re justifying it with a similar sentiment; there is some added importance granted to a relationship, especially one forged online, when you are able to finally put a face to the words on the screen you have been reading for so long, you reason. It’s a milestone any emotional connection forged over the internet much reach at some point.

Not that there’s an _emotional connection_ between you and Kanaya, per se; that makes it sound—well, you know. Odd. Sappy, maybe. 

You two are decidedly _not_ sappy, and that’s a good thing. You are quick and concise and brutal with your verbal sparring with her, made all the more so by the fact that she matches you blow for blow, parry for parry. There is no sentimentality here, obviously; not only do you not have the time to engage in such feelings—doubtless she doesn’t, either—but just the mere thought of adding any to your relationship, especially when you have so rigidly built it on sarcasm and the particular breed of irony Kanaya never fully gets, makes you feel very strange. Uncertain. Like you wouldn’t know how to operate properly under those circumstances.

A small, amazingly irritating part of you whispers _Jade Harley_ in your ears whenever your thoughts fall down this particular rabbit hole, and you have to stifle the urge to slap yourself across the back of the head more than once. This has nothing to do with Jade. That is mere—association by proximity, or something like that. Your dynamic with Jade was one thing, and yours with Kanaya is entirely another. They are separate entities. God, you barely even _talk_ to Jade now that the game has started and you’re both up to your eyes in side quests and nagging alien life forms; to devote this much thought to whatever feelings you had regarding your friendship with her is just plain _weird_.

To devote this much though into whatever feelings you have regarding _any_ of your friendships is weird. And you are not stupid; you know that, psychologically speaking, repeated musings on a particular subject often indicates that the individual has some unresolved issues or feelings regarding it that need to be worked through. Discussed. Openly confronted, at the very least.

Which, of course, makes no sense; you have no unresolved issues regarding this. That would just be stupid. Sure, you miss talking to Jade, but she is busy and you are busy and you understand this is how these things go; you still care for her deeply, but not every friendship is built to be a close one forever. And, sure, you enjoy your conversations with Kanaya as well, especially as they increase in frequency, but there’s no deeper meaning to be gleaned from this. There is no innate _emotional connection_ you have with her; you are friends, nothing more.

It’s not always the easiest pill to swallow, for some reason, but you grit your teeth, blow the heads off a few ogres, and force yourself to not respond to Kanaya instantly every time she messages to help it go down. 

.:.

\-- grimAuxiliatrix [GA] began pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] \--

GA: Rose

TT: No, don’t.

GA: You Dont Even Know What I Was Going To Say

TT: Of course I do.

TT: You are not nearly as opaque as you strive to be, Kanaya. 

TT: I can read you like a book by now.

GA: Somehow I Doubt That

GA: But Id Never Pass Up An Attempt To Watch You Stoke Your Own Ego So Please Lets Put This Omniscience To The Test Tell Me What Was I Going To Say To You

TT: You were going to ask me why I am lying in the ground in the middle of a forest, of course.

GA: … 

TT: The stoking is well-deserved as always, it seems.

GA: I Mean

GA: Is That Not A Fair Question To Ask

GA: Unless This Is Another One Of Your Species Bizarre And Convoluted Practices I Am Unaware Of And Have Yet To Understand Due To Their Comprehensive Lack Of Logical Basis I Do Not Think It Is Common Practice To Lay In The Middle Of A Forest Like You Are Doing Now

GA: I Spared You A Brief Glance Through My Viewport To Make Sure You Hadnt Blown Up Another Gate And Thought You Were Dead For A Second

TT: Is that concern I detect? Kanaya, I’m touched.

GA: Dread More Like It

GA: The Singular Agony I Can Imagine I Would Experience If I Had To Deal With You Following Me Around In My Dream Bubbles Is Nothing I Wish To Subject Myself To If I Can Avoid It

GA: So For My Sake How About We Put A Moratorium On Any Plans For Immediate Demise You Have And Instead Return To The Matter At Hand

GA: Why Are You Laying On The Floor Like That Rose

TT: We already covered this. 

GA: No We Did Not 

GA: Going Off Of Some Fabricated Subtext You Apparently Picked Up On In All Your Endless Quantities Of Emotional Intelligence You Replied To My Unasked Question With Quote No Dont Unquote 

GA: Which Hardly Quantifies As A Coherent Answer In My Book

TT: You should purchase a new novel, then.

TT: I hear basic conversational understanding is having a 50% sale. And a signing. You might make it to the front of the line if you’re lucky.

GA: Ha Ha

GA: Quite The Budding Comedian Arent We

TT: Never too late to rethink your career path.

GA: So What Are You Doing

TT: Are you always this nosy?

GA: I Dont Know Are You Always This Needlessly Defensive And Cagey

TT: I should turn you into a frog for just saying that.

GA: First Of All I Know You Cant Do That

TT: Don’t doubt the process, Kanaya.

GA: Second Of All Eridan Just Read That Message Over My Shoulder Because He Is Insufferable Like That And I Am Entirely Convinced He Almost Passed Out From Excitement

GA: He Is Currently A Very Bright Shade Of Purple 

GA: Clearly You Blowing Up His Computer Has Done Little To Stymie His Rather Begrudging Respect For You As A Fellow Connoisseur Of The Magical Arts

TT: I’ll admit, that visual did bring a smile to my face.

TT: Ten points to Gryffindor.

TT: Actually, I think you’re more of a Ravenclaw. Whatever.

GA: Can You Please Stop Using Made Up Words Now And Answer My Question

TT: God, you’re relentless today.

GA: And Youre Deliberately Avoidant

GA: Which Leads Me To Think There Is Something Prompting This Particular Behavior That You Are Uncomfortable With Confronting

GA: Which Only Makes Me More Curious

TT: Well, at least you’re transparent about it.

TT: I’m just thinking, really.

GA: While Lying In The Dirt

TT: It’s not a crime.

TT: This is my planet, after all. If I want to lounge about in the dirt for extended periods of time while pointlessly thinking about the destruction of my known universe and all the things have disappeared within it, who’s going to stop me?

GA: So That Is Whats Wrong

TT: Nothing’s wrong.

GA: You Are A Bad Liar You Know That

TT: Stop, I’m blushing.

GA: For What Its Worth I Think Lamentations Regarding The Rather Irreparable Changes This Game Has Brought Upon Both Of Our Universes Arent Exactly In Short Supply As Of Late

GA: Alternia Was An Unpleasant Place But It Was Also Home And I Know Many Of My Party Members Have Found Themselves Missing It On More Than One Occasion

GA: There Has Even Been Some Dramatic Sprawling About On Floors Like What Youre Doing Now

GA: What I Mean To Say Is I Get It

GA: I Guess

TT: It’s not that I’m missing anything, really. 

TT: I mean, all aspects of my life on Earth that I treasured — in a genuine, meaningful sense — are now here with me. My friends, my mother, the reanimated sprite of my dead cat,

GA: What Else Could A Girl Need Honestly

TT: Hah.

TT: But, no,

TT: It’s not a strange breed of homesickness that’s gotten me like this, unfortunately. 

TT: That I feel I could handle with relative ease.

TT: Rather I feel as if I’m grasping at the straws of antiquity as of late. Looking for something to justify a certain rhetoric I’ve swallowed hook, line, and sinker without even noticing, but the action is rendered all the more challenging by the fact that the fundamentals upon what the overarching problem is based no longer exist.

TT: Literally. My world has ended.

GA: Im Not Sure I Understand

TT: Me neither. That’s the issue.

TT: Sorry, that was stupid.

TT: Forget I said anything.

TT: I’ll talk to you later.

GA: Wait

\-- tentacleTherapist [TT] is now an idle chum! --

GA: Ugh 

.:.

After a while, the constant back-and-forth spin-cycle of self-doubt and questioning gets to be so exasperating and time-consuming for you to deal with that it's almost a relief when the Elder Gods finally open a line of communication between themselves and you.

Terrifying in a way that goes straight through you and settles in the core of your bones—a new chill takes up seemingly-permanent residence within you the second after you wake form your first dream with them in the background, whispering into your ears—and terrifying in a way that makes you think, though you would rather saw your arm off than admit it, that you are so, so out of your depth now. But relieving all the same.

It's not that the lines of communication with them you open serve as a distraction for the more unproductive thoughts that you can't seem to stop yourself from returning to several times a day—the whole laying in the dirt thing becomes something of a ritual occurrence, so much so that even Kanaya stops asking you about it, thank god—though that certainly is an added benefit; rather, it's the sense of _control_ speaking with them gives you.

Which is a bit baffling when you really think about it; the Horrorterrors are ancient, Lovecraftian gods so vast and powerful that their mere presence in the Furthest Ring warps the space-time continuum, rendering it a mere formality instead of the genuine, tangible concept your understanding allows you to see it as. The notion that you have even the barest vestiges of the upper hand in your conversations with them is almost laughable; sure, they are somewhat reliant on you to carry out their tasks, but they could also obliterate you with a mere wave of one of their many tentacles. You are alive only because you are useful to them, and in the moments where your panic-induced snark crosses a few too many lines of formality—though, in your defense, you never really were taught the proper etiquette for addressing the _Elder Gods_ back on Earth, funnily enough—you start to wonder if they will just kill you for being so annoying, regardless of whatever use you serve to them.

But despite this, you still feel inexplicably powerful as your communications with them grow more and more extensive. They are revealing bits and pieces of the game to you that you would've never found had they not shown you; they are making you more adept at destroying this farce of a universe from the inside out, and, really, with a session so stacked against you, so doomed to fail, you're happy to take whatever information you can get. 

Even if the Green Sun starts to become more of an issue, and your own life starts to swing in the balance. Well, that's what Kanaya says—Seriously Rose I Really Do Not Think Youre Considering The Consequences That Sort Of Action Would Pose On You Because Let Me Tell You There Are A Lot And They Would All Be Horrible—but you find yourself erring on the side of disbelief more and more; it's just a dreamself death, after all, and though you trust that Kanaya knows what she's talking about in regards to the importance dreamselves have on a player's progress through the game, you think sometimes she forgets one key fact: you do not care about your progress through the game even in the slightest, not in the traditional sense.

So you don't care about the prospect of dying at the Green Sun, regardless of what the consequences may be. It's conducive to many of your current goals: getting the Horrorterrors to trust you more and thus give you more information, defeating—or at least neutralizing—Jack, and providing yourself with ample distraction for your own interpersonal issues.

Because they are not even clsoe to being important. And there's something about the prospect of dropping a bomb in a star double the size of your known universe that really helps hone this point home.

So, really, who are you to complain? 

.:.

When Kanaya starts to get overtly concerned about the up-and-coming blackout on your end that neither of you can explain, you have absolutely no idea how to handle what it makes you feel for a very long time.

It’s not so much that openly expressed feelings to this intensity are a very new aspect of your friendship with Kanaya—though they are, and it’s disarming in ways that aren’t entirely unpleasant if you think about it for long enough. It’s that—well, it’s that it is such physical, tangible proof that she cares.

That she, Kanaya Maryam, _cares_ about you. Cares about your wellbeing. Cares enough to put up the act of threatening to sic one of her friends on you to stop anything from happening. Cares enough to tell you openly that she is worried for you.

Of course, this is all easily explained by your mother— _parental issues_ , says the little Freud living in your head somewhat smugly; _it all comes back to parental issues_ —as so many things are. You are unused to overt displays of concern such as this. Genuineness is not something you are particularly well-versed in, especially when it comes to being on the receiving end of it, so of course you’re reacting with unusually strong emotions. This is simply something new for you, and you are adjusting. You are overcompensating for thirteen years of a lack of it, perhaps. 

You are finding it is nice to be cared about, especially by her. 

No, no, that’s all wrong. That’s the wrong way to look at this. Think compensation. Think lake of better idea how to react. Think _Freud_ , Lalonde, think Freud.

The center of Freud’s theories regarding sexuality, the core upon which everything rested, was the innate notion of heterosexuality being a preconceived social construct more than anything; it was passed down through necessity in regards to biological reproduction and societal conditioning. Indeed, based on his research, one could make the argument that _no one is_ truly _heterosexual; it is merely a farce, a construct; and yet it is still wrong, you are still wrong, everything about this is wrong and you’re going to—_

You stop thinking Freud. He was always something of a hack, anyways. 

.:.

It is a decidedly cruel twist of fate that Jade is the one to tell you your mother is dead. 

For a second after she speaks, you feel nothing. Your entire being is devoted to absorbing the image in the cue ball before you; bloodstained tiles and tar-black rain and your mother’s body thrown out across the floor like a discarded rag doll. For a second, this is all you can see, all you can register; your body is working overtime to take in and process and package the image away, removing it from your sphere of concern before you flip, snap, finally lose your shit, and—

And then the anger hits like a semi-truck, colliding into every atom of your being, lighting you up from the inside. You are burning up; you are corroding away; you are so angry you cannot speak, cannot breathe, cannot see anything but blackness crawling at the edges of your vision and bloodstains seared onto the backs of your eyelids.

It takes every fiber of restraint you possess not to blow up at Jade. You cannot shoot the messenger, not when she has done nothing wrong. Not when this outcome is a product of your own negligence, your own aggrandized childishness, your own convoluted maternal issues, and she is simply the vessel for the information confirming this. Jade is blameless, you remind yourself. Jade is blameless. 

But it is so hard to keep a lid on the wash of fury that threatens to explode out from inside of you. It is so hard to remain calm when your mother is dead; she is just lying there dead, black and red swirling around her, her martini glass smashed to pieces at her side. It is so hard to remain calm when the basement has been obliterated, you are drowning in the boxes, pressed down under the weight of everything you do not understand. It is so hard to stay calm amidst all this, so hard to hold onto anything, so hard to try to even _think_. 

So you don’t.

You have been on the edge for a long time, only dipping your toes in even as the voices in your head that don’t entirely belong to you scream at you to take the plunge, and the balancing act has become tiresome. It is a futile waste of time. You will fall regardless; why delay the inevitable?

So you don’t try to remain steady anymore. You stop. You breathe. You ask.

And you let go. 

You are suddenly freezing cold, the chill seeping into your mouth, your lungs, your stomach, filling up every orifice until you are frozen from the inside out. Breathing comes slow and languid, the process laborious, like each atom of oxygen you suck in is suddenly a billion times heavier. You are weightless and locked down against the floor at the same time; your vision is a dizzying haze of black and purple; you feel something—fingers, claws, tentacles, you don’t know—grazing up and down your arms, wrapping around your neck, pulling your head back to whisper into your ears like school children passing secrets.

_kill him destroy him burn him away from the inside out rip him to shred and bring the pieces back to us_

And you are listening.

_take his life take what is yours it’s yours it’s yours this whole world is yours you are the harbinger you will kill him you will kill him you will kill_

For the first time, you are listening.

.:.

In the end, death hurts more than you would have expected. 

Jack’s sword goes through you easily; you are crashing back down to the ground, spitting up black tar and blood before you’re even fully aware of what happened. You cannot see him, cannot even focus enough to try, but somewhere in your periphery, you know John is there too, cold and pale and lifeless. 

_fight this get up destroy him_ demand the voices and you feel ablaze again, cold and hot and _angry_ , unspeakable forces buzzing at your fingertips, but then you cough again and your vision whites out and you know that you— _kill kill kill_ —are not getting up again. 

In the end, you do not see the light. There is no dark tunnel. There is no welcoming long-deceased relative to guide you through, holding your hand; even Jaspers does not make an appearance. In the end, everything is cold and hazy with pain; you think of Dave and John and your mouth twists; you think of Jade and guilt echoes around your body, distantly. You might be crying—it’s very hard to tell when your body is cold and numb and burning from the inside out. You think of Kanaya and you’re crying for sure now, tear tracks scorching on your face, burning rivulets into your skin. The narrative is unraveling; you cough again and feel something hot and sticky bubble in the back of your throat, inky and sour. You are dying and you think of Jade and Kanaya and the questions and blank spaces and precipices and metal boxes and jealousy and panic and video calls and pixelated screenshots and the—

And the _questions_ —

_your duty is upon you rip his heart out burn him alive desecrate his soul send it to the furthest ring this is you this is you this—_

_this is who you are_

And in the end, the last thing you feel is anger. This time it does not belong to the Elder Gods; it is not a silent, foreign force pounding through your veins, distorting your vision, scrambling your brain, pulling you up like a marionette. This time, the anger is all yours.

.:.

Dave has questions about your grimdarkness you cannot answer. He wants to know if you really grew tentacles. He wants to know what language you were speaking in, because apparently you were rendered entirely unintelligible during your conversations with John. 

He wants to know if you’re okay. 

The last one, you tell him, is irrelevant. You are both standing in front of a bomb that will blow you to a billion pieces; your subsequent okay-ness is going to be rendered very null and void in just a handful of minutes. You are going to die, as is he; you have allowed him to come here knowing so, a veritable lamb to slaughter, and the guilt and rage that pours through you at that thought makes it hard to feel you deserve to be even remotely within the same territory of _okay_.

Space is cold. A part of you still hasn’t fully warmed up since being released from the throes of the Elder Gods, and the dreamer robes are doing little to stymie the additional chill that the empty void around you welcomes. In front of you, the clock on The Tumor ticks ever closer zero, which isn’t really helping matters much.

Beside you, Dave looks calm, face impassive as always, but you know him well enough to read the subtle giveaways on his face that indicate fear: the rhythmic tensing in his jaw, the slight press of his lips, the way he stands stock-still, back straight like a soldier, tense and at the ready. 

You know you should be keeping your attention grounded, focused on the countdown slowly ticking to zero in front of you, the black-and-white ball of spines almost mocking you as it sits there, ready to blow a hole in the universe. At the very least, you should keep your attention on Dave, your brother, one of your best friends. After all, it is through your own selfishness, your own cowardice that he is here; you have brought him here to die, so the least you can do is give him your undivided attention in these remaining minutes.

It would be the right, the good thing to do, which is why you can’t even bring yourself to be surprised when you find yourself reaching into your pocket to pull out your headset.

You shouldn’t do this. You aren’t doing this for John. You aren’t doing this for Jade.

God, _Jade_. You swallow back what feels suspiciously like a sob. _Fuck_.

You swallow again and brush that though aside; it’s a wasted effort at this point; you know this. Hands shaking, you flick the headset on, watch as the world tints green around you, and open Pesterchum.

You shouldn’t do this. You’re not going this for your friends, your best friends, so why are you doing it for her? It doesn’t make any sense.

More importantly than the ever-present uncertainty, you realize, is this: it isn’t fair on her to do this. It isn’t fair to make her listen to you say goodbye. Not when you know she’ll think there was something she could have done, some way she could have stopped this, some way she could have soared you. Because that’s how she thinks. You know that’s how she thinks.

You know her. The realization makes your throat burn. Despite all your efforts, you know her. And you know this will hurt her.

And you’re doing it anyways.

\-- tentacleTherapist [TT] began pestering grimAuxiliatrix [GA]\--

TT: Hello.

TT: I’ll keep this brief.

TT: Doubtless you have better things to occupy your time with than the monotonous ramblings of a teenage girl staring her own mortality in the face.

TT: I simply wanted to say thank you, I guess.

TT: Though I’m often loath to admit it, your presence in this game has been very helpful. I doubt I would’ve gotten this far without you.

TT: Also,

TT: Comforting, I guess.

TT: It’s been nice to have a friend throughout all this.

And if your fingers stumble over the _friend_ there, you let it slide. You’re going to die anyways; none of that—whatever _that_ is—matters anymore.

TT: I suppose I should contextualize these messages somewhat lest they read as rather inconclusive and ominous.

TT: Though I’m sure Dave has informed his chosen companions of what fate is about to descend upon us and I am sure you will hear of it through the grapevine in due time.

TT: We’re at the Green Sun right now.

TT: With The Tumor.

TT: It’s set to detonate in approximately fifteen minutes. Saying that both Dave and I have already expended those pesky dreamselves, the finality of the outcome this mission holds is relatively set in stone.

TT: And I felt it would be imprudent of me to leave in such a manner without properly wishing you goodbye, so. 

TT: There’s quite a bit more I could say if put to the test, but I think I’m approaching dangerously close to my allotted word count, so I’ll end the tirade here.

TT: Goodbye, Kanaya.

TT: And again, thank you.

\-- tentacleTherapist [TT] has logged off! --

You stow the headset, swallowing back something hard and heavy. It doesn’t matter anymore. You repeat that like a mantra, like a prayer, looping it over and over again in the back of your head. Whatever you feel, it doesn’t matter anymore. 

You fumble in the dark and your fingers find Dave’s. His hand is warm and shaking. Your throat is burning.

“I’m sorry,” you whisper, and the tightening of his grip on you is the only indication he gives that he’s heard you.

Deep within the darkest recesses of your mind, the box slowly materializes again, long-since departed from the basement you dropped it in, back out in the open. You let it be.

It doesn’t matter anymore, after all. 

Dave swipes his thumb over your knuckles, and you have to close your eyes against the wash of guilt that threatens to drown you from the inside. You’re not even sure if it’s solely about bringing Dave to his death anymore, and that somehow makes it so much worse. 

When The Tumor explodes, you are acutely aware for a split second of the feeling of being torn apart, atom by atom, your whole being burning away into shapeless, formless agony. You think you open your mouth—to scream, maybe—but before you can do anything, the world around you shifts, dissolving into red, then white, then black.

.:.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> teehee i finally finished this so now i can speed update...also this chap is just Gay Panic defined god bless

She is breathtaking.

It’s the first thought of value your brain can offer up when you land on the meteor, decidedly not dead, Daye hovering at your side, still gripping your hand. You are exhausted, confused, and angry. Your body is aching like you just lost ten rounds with a cinderblock. You are not entirely sure what to do with the weight of the knowledge that you, by all laws of nature, should have just died, but didn’t; the turn of events is leaving you jarred in a way you’re unable to explain. Visually speaking, you’re certain you aren’t faring much better; you probably look like you recently got—well, _killed_. You feel sweaty and dirty, sticky with residual dark magic you haven’t had the opportunity to wash off yet. You still feel cut up and bruised from your earlier fight with Jack, and you’re almost certain that you’re still covered in splatters of Skaian rain and your mother’s blood; you probably still smell like it, at least.

And Kanaya Maryam is just so—incomparably _gorgeous_ it makes your heart freeze up in your chest. Every thought, every worry, every mounting panic flies straight out of your head the moment you just _see_ her in the first place. 

It might be trite to say so, but the photo she sent you didn’t even come close to doing her full visage justice. She cuts an imposing figure, rising above the short stature of two other trolls she stands next to—given the blood-red glasses of one and the irritatingly loud speaking volume of the other, you assume them to be Terezi and Karkat respectively. Like the others, her hair is ink-black, framing her face, and from the top of her head grows a pair of sleek-looking horns, one curved at the end. Unlike the others, her skin is not ashy-grey but brilliant white; she seems to glow a little, too, light radiating from her like a beacon. She is all defined shapes and angles: the line of her jaw, the cut of her lipstick, the slope of her neck and hollow of her collarbones; somehow, though, it doesn’t feel sharp in a way that's imposing. There is an indiscernible quality of warmth she seems to radiate, even from a distance. It’s something in her eyes, you think, or the way she smiles with her whole face, fangs slipping over her bottom lip. It’s something in the dress she’s wearing—as gorgeous as she is, expertly made by none other than her, you’re betting. It’s something about the way just seeing her in real life makes you feel: dizzy, shaky, excited.

Or it’s just the glowing. On second thoughts, it’s definitely just the glowing.

Your poetical waxing is hastily interrupted by the general greetings that ensue after your’s and Dave’s arrival: Terezi practically flings herself at your brother, pulling him into a half-hug, half-headlock, muttering about how he scared the shit out of her, _coolkid_. Karkat gives him a funny look before drifting away to go talk to another troll and you are left somewhat stranded in the middle of the clearing, unable to do anything but stare right at Kanaya.

Unable to do anything as her gaze slowly— _infuriatingly_ slowly, you can’t help but think—shifts from Karkat to Terezi to Dave to finally you.

There is a pause in which the two of you simply stare at each other, you suddenly aware of how awful you probably look and feeling more than a little distressed about it, her just looking at you, eyes widening in what appears to be disbelief. Then, before the silence pushes you into flat-out panic, she kicks into action, crossing the clearing in record timing, stopping abruptly right in front of you. You have to tilt your head up a little to look her in the face.

For a second, neither of you speak; you are finding it suddenly very hard to formulate thoughts around the realization that you are really here, looking at Kanaya Maryam in the flesh. She sort of looks like she’s about to explode.

“I got your messages,” she finally says, voice strained.

Suddenly, you have the very strong urge to crawl into a hole somewhere and die; you _knew_ you were going to regret that, goddamnit. You opt for a grimace instead. “Ah. Quite an embarrassing affair, considering that I’m, well—” You gesture vaguely at yourself. “— _alive_ , and all. Something about starting the thing that’s about to end your life in the face that makes just one rather—tangential, I guess.” Her gaze is hard to hold—you get the distinct impression she is staring straight through you—so you drop your eyes to her shoulder. “I’m sorry about it all. Probably not the most uplifting of things to read.”

“Rose.”

You feel an inexplicable thrill at hearing her say your name, rolling the _R_ in a way you’ve never heard before but find immensely interesting. The sound is undeniably a little distracting, but there is something about the way her voice catches on the vowels—shaking, unsteady—that makes a dull spike of concern shoot through you, shaking you out of your thoughts; you break your staring match with her collar bone to meet her piercing gaze again. 

Her eyes—glowing a dull yellow like two car headlights—are glassy. She looks pained. 

“I wanted to—”

But before you can finish—potentially a good thing, saying as you had _no_ idea where you were going to go with that one—she is reaching out to you, pulling you into a hug so tight you swear your spine pops. She is quite a bit taller than you, you realize; she’s able to press her chin to the top of your head as you inadvertently bury your face into the crook of her neck. Your arms, seeming to have taken on a mind of their own, slip around her waist without you telling them to, squeezing her tight. One of her hands splays out on your back, right between your shoulder blades; the other comes up to cradle the base of your skull, fingers winding through your hair. You breathe in deep, face still pressed against her neck, and she smells like jasmine and pennies and you—

Oh, god, you just feel so _warm_. You feel so warm and safe and you’re practically clinging to her now, drinking in lungfuls of her scent, trying to immortalize the feeling of her hand in your hair and her cheek on your head, her pulse so strong against you it feels like it’s yours.

This is because of the Green Sun, of course; you are responding to trauma through seeking physical comfort—an atypical habit for you, but the extenuating circumstances are similarly atypical enough for you to let it slide—but, Christ, this feels too good to care about the intention behind everything for just a moment.

“I’m sorry,” you whisper into her shoulder, and she just holds you tighter. You can feel her hands shaking. 

When the two of you finally pull apart, she swipes the heel of her hand across both her cheeks in quick succession and sniffs a little; you tactfully look away and try to wrangle the inexplicable feeling realizing she has been brought to tears because of concern for you gives you back into its box.

“Needless to say,” Kanaya says, her voice only a little shaky. “If you ever do something like that again, I have plans to dismember you with my chainsaw.”

She is looking at you intently now, eyes bright with something fierce and warm that makes your stomach clench painfully. Meeting her gaze is starting to make unhelpful trains of thought kick themselves into gear, and you are too tired and sore to exercise proper control over them, so you drop your gaze to her shoulder again.

Her hands haven’t left you; they remain affixed on your elbows, as if holding you in place, keeping you from slipping away from her again. Even though her body temperature is relatively on par with yours, no warmer, her touch burns straight through you. Despite the undeniable relief it gives you, panic still crawls up your throat, screaming at you to shake her off, put a healthy amount of distance between the two of you; the ever-present chill in the center of your bones, though, keeps you in place, leaning into the touch in a way that makes your head swim with embarrassment. You have to take several deep breaths and focus very hard on sounding as normal as possible before you speak next.

“We should head over to the others,” you say, and you are looking anywhere but her now, her hands on you the only thing you are able to focus on, even as you try your best to ignore it. “I hear we have a new session to crash.”

.:.

You notice it first on the meteor right before the journey starts.

Honestly, it might’ve gone right over your head were you not so determinedly observing everyone around you so as not to spend long, uninterrupted periods of time staring at Kanaya beside you like she is the most interesting thing your universe or hers has ever produced. Now that you’ve gotten yourself under control a little more, you’ve managed to dial back your sentiments regarding her visage into ones of simple aesthetic appreciation. Though you have been reminding yourself somewhat constantly that there is nothing wrong with liking how your friend looks in the purely aesthetic sense, the repetition doesn’t quite stick for some reason and you feel panicked every time you look at her for more than a few seconds on end.

So you’re looking at everyone else in the group with rigid intensity. It’s probably making you look a little crazy, but between your recent nearly-completed suicide mission and your lapse into grimdarkness that everyone has somehow found out about, _a little crazy_ is rapidly becoming something like your brand. 

And, really, you kind of can’t help _but_ notice it. 

How much the trolls— _touch_ each other. Whether it be due to the inner maladapted child within you, or the rather rigid American standards of personal space, or something entirely else, you are nearly floored at how common physical contact is between them. 

Some of it you could dismiss as the troll equivalent of the play fighting you remember seeing between boys when you used to go to school—not a minute passes before Karkat and Sollux somehow have gotten their hands on each other, Sollux ruffling Karkat’s hair, Karkat flicking him on the shoulder, the both of them trying to drape themselves over each other as much as possible. And you would dismiss this physicality as a particular breed of closeness on their part, but it is fair from unique to them alone. When Sollux isn’t trying to make Karkat’s hair stand up in a spike while the smaller troll rattles off another obscenity-ridden tirade, he’s wrapping his arms around Aradia, pressing his face into her hair, running his fingers along her wings, and she is equally reciprocal of these actions. Terezi hovers around Dave, still half-hanging around his neck, poking his face and pulling his glasses off to try them on and fiddling with the hem of his new cape; when she’s not busy with _him_ , she's attached to Vriska, the two of them practically lounging on top of each other as they take turns interjecting unhelpful commentary into Karkat’s speeches. Even Kanaya—who you've determined to be the more physically reserved of the trolls—exchanges brief semi-hugs with Karkat; you totally do not watch as, while Aradia and Dave are trying to explain time loops to the group, she lets him lean against her, dropping her cheek to the top of his head.

Like the justification for your own actions with Kanaya, you’re almost willing to tack the trolls’ behavior up to a response to trauma; you do not know exactly what has transpired in their session, but you can read the room well enough to know it wasn’t pretty. But there is something so effortless in the way they all interact with each other; there appears to be none of the burning desperation you had felt when Kanaya pulled you in for the hug, so you’re forced to conclude that, either as a friend group or as a species on a whole, these trolls are just very physically affectionate.

It only worsens as the eventual six meteor crew members—you, Kanaya, Dave, Karkat, Terezi, and Vriska—settle into your now home for the next three years: Vriska and Terezi remain as connected as ever; Karkat, when he is not pretending to be responsible, turns his attention towards hounding Dave, poking and flicking him at any given opportunity, constantly trying to steal his sunglasses or mess up his hair or shove him over furniture.

And though she is undeniably more measured than her comrades, Kanaya is hands-on with you, too. She is more subtle, less physically aggressive about it, but it is still there in a way you could not ignore if you devoted every atom of your being to trying. She will brush her hands over your shoulders as she moves behind you to get coffee during breakfast, bump the backs of your hands together as the two of you walk back to your rooms at the end of the night. She will sometimes reach out to adjust parts of your outfit: smoothing down a crease in your shirt, fixing the twisted strap of your dress, brushing meteor dust off your sweater. 

One time, the two of you are in the library, you talking notes on Sburb in your journal and her sewing something beside you. You had left your headband in your room that day and, as a consequence, your hair had been falling into your eyes for the past ten minutes no matter how rigorously you shook or blew it away. You’re about to abandon the concept you’re midway through illustrating and find a hair tie somewhere when Kanaya, with a small smile gracing her face, pulls one off her wrist. You open your mouth to thank her and immediately forget what words are as, instead of giving it to you, she reaches behind you and puts your hair up for you. 

Her hands are very warm. Her nails scrape your scalp a little. You can feel her smiling at you as she pulls back, admiring her handiwork for a moment before turning back to her sewing like absolutely nothing out of the ordinary just happened.

You have to write out four full pages of notes before you feel normal again.

And the weirdest thing is the gestures never feel as if they are coming from a weird or uncomfortable place. They never feel as if they are ridden with untoward-intent behind the scenes; Kanaya does not mean anything by them, you’re certain. It’s simply a cultural difference, it seems, made all the more prevalent by your rather reserved upbringing, nothing more. 

It's also, well, _nice._ In the ways that occasional physical contact from one's friends is, of course. 

But it still catches you by surprise when it happens more often than not—see your reserved childhood again—and it’s after one of these moments where you start particularly bad when she sits down next to you on the couch that she turns to you, a small frown on her face.

“I don’t mean to be presumptuous,” she says, enunciating each word as she always does. She should narrate an audiobook. zYou would definitely listen to it. “Rather I have been affording myself some observation as of late, and I’ve started to notice your somewhat—adverse reactions to my initiating physical contact with you.”

The English language is a fickle thing, you’ve decided. One moment your mastery over it is total and comprehensive; the next, you are entirely certain you could not string a coherent sentence together should your life depend on it.

Mercifully, Kanaya keeps talking. “I’m sure you’ve noticed by now the somewhat more tactile natures of my friends and myself, so I do not—” A funny look crosses her face. “— _mean_ anything by it, necessarily, but if it is making you uncomfortable, I will of course stop at once.”

You are currently having a lot of thoughts, and the majority of them are devoted to the look of gentle worry on Kanaya’s face or faint pressure her knee is exuding as it brushes against yours. None of them are devoted to formulating a helpful reply to her. Goddamnit.

“Rose?”

This is the part where you agree. This is the part where you nod your head and say _yes, Kanaya, you and your friends’ strange habits of affection are an immense and pressing source of discomfort for me because I am a human who has come into regular physical contact with exactly two other individuals before I met you and am very unadjusted to this particular behavior of yours._ This is the part where you _say regardless of that, there are certain established boundaries human friendships hold and you are probably breaking at least eight of them daily and it would be weird and inappropriate for me to want you to continue doing so._

This is the part where you say _stop_.

“No, it’s quite alright,” you hear aloud in your own voice. That’s odd. You have absolutely no recollection of telling yourself to say _that._ “It just catches me off guard sometimes, is all. Don’t worry about it.”

Kanaya gives you a warm, relief-tinted smile, and the buzz it gives you is almost enough to override the crushing feeling of embarrassment that washes over you. It’s almost enough to drown out the voice that picks up in the back of your head, chanting _wrong, wrong, wrong_ on loop like a broken record. It’s almost enough for you to feel okay about your response, for you to not want to curl up and hide somewhere very far away from this couch and let the next three years and the girl beside you pass you by.

Almost, but not quite enough. It takes a very long time for you to fall asleep that night.

.:.

You are fourteen years old, and you have faced down virtually every demon in the book.

Some have been more metaphorical—a legacy of childhood neglect, grief over the death of loved ones; the strange feelings you have to grapple with after the Green Sun mission did not go as planned—and some have been demons in the literal sense of the word: imps and ogres and the voices of the Gods of the Furthest Ring. Some have even simply been the day-to-day demons of the typical teenage variation. Regardless of their particular type, they all share one commonality, though: you have faced and beaten them all, and you have done so with a stony visage and complete external calmness.

And yet when Kanaya asks you to model for her, you throw up in your bathroom sink five seconds after saying yes.

You’re sure that, if you think about it hard enough, you can find a very good reason for this. You’re certain that there’s a logical explanation out there somewhere, preferably one that’s easy to digest and doesn’t make you want to die. You can practically _feel_ its existence, just at the edges of your periphery, taunting you as you search blindly for it. 

Alas, searching for it is something of a moot point now, because you are standing in the center of your friend’s brightly lit room, surrounded by piles of books and miniature mountains of fabric scraps, the aforementioned friend’s hands currently holding a tape measure to your back, humming a little under her breath. You have been modeling for the past twenty five minutes, have breathed maybe twice, and have not had a single consilient thought since you set foot in her room.

There is a logical explanation for this, too, and as soon as your brain decides to start working again, you’re going to come up with it. Of course you will. You’re Rose Lalonde, Seer of Light—logical explanations are your expertise. 

“You okay?” Kanaya asks, voice a little muffled. “Not hurting you?”

She is much less verbose when she is working. This was a fact you picked up on in record timing and now have absolutely no idea what to do with. It has joined the cohort of other seemingly-purposeless observations you’ve made about Kanaya, slotting nicely in between classics such as the fact that she is almost a full head taller than you and the fact her eyes have small flecks of gold in them that seem to shine brighter whenever she is happy.

“No, I’m fine,” you say aloud, willing your voice to come out steady. “Recovered well from my last laceration.” 

She had accidentally scraped the back of your neck with a pin a few minutes earlier and had said sorry nearly ten times in response. Despite never being one to grow uneasy at the sight or sensation of injury, you had felt, oddly enough, like you were going to pass out. 

Behind you, she huffs a laugh, and you feel her breath on the small of your back. A shiver runs up your spine. “Ever the dramatist, then.”

Her hand runs up between your shoulder blades and you start counting the panels of wood on the floor. Any pithy response you might’ve had to that has curled up in a hole somewhere and died an excruciatingly painful death. 

You are, of course, being absolutely ridiculous right now, and if you were even a modicum more put together, your skin would probably be crawling the way it does when you think about Kanaya touching you too much. As it is, though, every time her hands so much as grace your figure, your brain does a very fun thing where it entirely stops producing thoughts, so the mental tirade you typically subject yourself to in these situations has been postponed for later. 

You’re not sure what to think about this. On one hand, allowing yourself to fully relax in Kanaya’s presence, let her be near you without spiraling into a particularly vitriolic breed of panic is so nice you don’t know how to fully express it.

On the other, just thinking that makes you feel so weird and tense and guilty you lose the ability to see straight. Normal people do not react to their friends literally just measuring the proportions of their body like this—it’s inappropriate. It’s inappropriate and uncomfortable and _wrong—_

“Alright.” Kanaya’s voice cuts through your thoughts, and you feel a sense of relief that lasts for all of two seconds before it’s taken over by inexplicable guilt again. She moves until she’s standing in front of you, smiling. “I think that should be good for today.”

She is close to you. Very close to you. “Is that all you have to do? Just the measuring?”

“Well, once I cut the dimensions of the fabric out, it’d be helpful to have a body there so I can accurately pin them up before I start sewing, but it’s not a necessity.” She jerks her head to the corner of her room behind you. “That’s what I have the mannequins for, after all.”

You should probably respond in some capacity to that, or at least acknowledge the presence of the aforementioned objects. You find yourself rather consumed, though, with her lipstick. It’s nothing out of the ordinary for her—a simple black shade you’ve seen dozens of times now—but there is something about how cleanly it’s been applied, the lines crisp and sharp, that is oddly distracting today. You wonder how she gets it so perfect. You have the mental image of her in front of her mirror, mouth open just a little, nose scrunched in the way it gets when she’s concentrated, lipstick in hand.

And then you think about kissing her.

The image hits so hard you swear it breaks a few of your ribs. One moment you’re just standing there, watching Kanaya as she says words you can’t fully hear right now; the next, you are suddenly hyper-aware of how close the two of you are, how you can feel her breath on your face each time she exhales, how her fangs glint in the bright light of her bedroom. And you are thinking about every atom of space between the two of you and how shockingly easy it would be to simply lean forward and close the distance. How easy it would be to press your lips to hers. It would be like turning a light switch on.

There’s a metaphor in there. There’s definitely a metaphor in there somewhere. You don’t want to think about it. Actually, you’re deciding that you don’t want to _think,_ period. You’re rapidly discovering how overrated the whole process is, and if your brain is going to dress up frankly _absurd_ notions like _kissing your friend_ as helpful or productive lines of thought, perhaps there might be more to lobotomizing yourself than initially seems.

You do not want to kiss Kanaya. Of course you don’t. She is your good friend and a girl, and there is absolutely nothing in you that makes you want to kiss your good friends _or_ girls. You especially do not want to kiss your good friends who are girls. 

You are not homosexual. You know you are not. You have known this for as long as you’ve known what the word _homosexual_ means and the idea that you somehow got that assessment _wrong_ is just _inconceivable_. You are Rose Lalonde; you aren’t _wrong_ about these sorts of things, especially when these sorts of things directly link back to your own character which—and you are happy to admit this—you know better than the back of your own hand.

The idea that you somehow _don’t_ is just—no. It’s just not something you’re willing to entertain. For reasons entirely pertaining to your somewhat innate inability to let yourself be wrong and most certainly _not_ due to what the connotations of you being wrong about this particular thing might be.

Because what if you do if you are? That’s what it keeps coming back to—the question of what next. The question of how you’re supposed to react. The question of how _others_ are supposed to react—your friends here, your brother, John and Jade when you reconnect with them. The question of how you’re supposed to just do _anything_ under the knowledge that you have then been rendered so fundamentally and utterly _wrong._

About yourself. You grit your teeth. Wrong about _yourself_. 

Because homosexuality isn’t _wrong._ you are not living in the dark ages and you refuse to give into any sort of behavior that would create that sort of impression; you have spent enough time around those who _do_ to know that it is an entirely abhorrent line of thinking to flaunt. You know this. You aren’t an idiot.

You just aren’t. You just don’t want to kiss Kanaya, and giving into the half-baked pretense that you _do_ is wrong. Giving into the inferences that can be drawn from the admittance of that desire—that you perhaps harbor attraction to women in some way, shape, or form—is wrong. Not that homosexuality in its entirety is, but merely that it is when it's localized to you specifically. That’s where the issue arises.

You are aware, of course, of how absurdly hypocritical this sounds. It would almost make you laugh were you the sort of idiot who found decidedly unfunny things hysterical. 

“Rose?” 

Her voice cuts straight through you, a hot knife to butter, and you are suddenly excruciatingly aware of everything around you, like someone has dialed your senses up to eleven. You feel both very heavy and very light at the same time, and there is suddenly nothing more imperative than getting out of her room _right the fuck now_. “Hm?” 

“I asked if you could come by tomorrow to help me again. If you’re amenable to that, of course.”

“Oh.” _Say no, say no, say no, you fucking creep._ “Um, sure.”

The smile she gives you is dazzling; just looking at her makes your heart clench in your chest, and you would like for nothing more in this moment than to rip your brain out of your skull and throw it off the side of the meteor. 

You don’t throw up again when you get back to your room, but you do fling yourself down face-first onto your bed, drop a pillow over your head, and lay there for a very long time, entirely motionless, jaw clenched so tight you can feel your teeth grinding each other down. 

The back of your mouth tastes sour. Your head hurts. Your whole body feels shaky and insubstantial, like a single breath of wind could blow you into nothingness. _Where’s John when you need him_ , you think, and give a single, somewhat bitter snort. Your nose is still filled with the smell of jasmine and your spine is still buzzing and—

And you don’t know what you want. You have no idea what you want anymore.

.:.

Of course, this all comes back to your mother.

You are sitting in your room, head on your desk, indulging in your favorite pastime as of late: useless mental pontification.

But it’s true. For all the decided crank Freud is—you find yourself more adverse to his theories than usual as of late for totally unspecified and unimportant reasons—he did hit at least part of the nail on the head with his repeated insistences that many of an individual’s problems can be traced back to their parental unit—or lack thereof. In your case, it’s a bizarre combination of the two—you had a mother who, in the past, treated absenteeism like a quota she had to fulfill when you were young and who, presently is dead—and you are undeniably certain it is your tenuous relationship with her that is causing every one of your problems right now.

It has to be. You’ve already negated every other option as either stupid or unhelpful; this is something of your last resort.

You’re digressing, though. Back to your mother. 

You think that, should she have been more of an active, coherent figure in your childhood, the issues you had with Jade would not have arisen. You were a child who had grown up virtually alone infrequently coming into contact with individuals your own age, and Jade was warm and kind and loving in ways you had only ever dreamed about. Though you hate to diminish the value of your friendship with her, because it _was_ important and it _was_ real and you _did_ care for her—you still do—you also can’t help but acknowledge that she was in the right place at the right time to an extent, too. Like you said—you were _lonely_ , and she was someone willing to be your friend. Of course you got over-attached, of course you developed strong feelings of affection, of course those lines maybe got a little blurred in the back of your mind at moments. 

Your entire relationship with your mother had been founded off of insincerity—the genuine variety from you, and the more presumed variety from her—and Jade had been so unlike anyone you had ever met in the sense that she was unflinchingly genuine and honest. You never had to second-guess her feelings; she told you that she cared about you, straight up. You had simply reacted in the way anyone would when presented with something new and highly appealing—indulging in it, excessively. 

_And look where that got you,_ you think. Then groan into your arms. 

Two days ago, Dave came out.

You had sensed that something was going on with him for quite some time, truthfully. It hadn’t seemed like a _bad_ thing, though, so you had been willing to let it pass you by, reasoning that he would come talk to you about it if he felt that was appropriate. Pushing the envelope would’ve only caused problems, you decided, and left it at that.

The argument could be made that you were only leaving it alone so you could endlessly stew over your own bullshit, but thinking like that makes you feel stupid and selfish, so you tried to tack it up to simple respect of your brother’s boundaries and leave it at that.

But things had come to head after dinner two days ago. Vriska and Terezi had disappeared, no doubt now running around the bowels of the meteor causing more problems than should be physically possible. Karkat had retired to his room, Kanaya to the library, and you were finishing up on washing the dishes, intending to follow the latter, when you heard Dave cough behind you.

“Unless that’s a vocalization of your guilt over making me do all the cleaning up tonight, I don’t want to hear it,” you had said, turning the tap off and reaching for one of the dishtowels.

Behind you, Dave had given a small snort. “Nah, you look like you’re having a party without me. Don’t wanna break it up.”

“How sensitive of you.”

“I actually, uh, wanted to talk really quick. If you’ve got a second.”

There had been something about his voice, some almost-imperceptible tremor to it that had made you pause, setting the dishes aside and turning to face him. His sunglasses had been rammed as high up on his nose as they would go, and you could see his hands balling into fists and then relaxing at a steady rate in his pockets.

You quirked an eyebrow. “What’s up?”

And then Dave, for all his tangential ramblings, for all his colloquial verbosity, for all his long-winded messages had always made you feel like you were reading a college dissertation written by a someone with all the informality and social graces of a thirteen year old, does something you would’ve never expected him to do: he gets right to the point.

Actually, he scratches the back of his neck, stares at the ceiling for a moment, and _then_ gets to the point.

“I like guys.”

No, no, _no_. You groan into your arms again, squeezing your eyes shut, bringing that particular memory to an abrupt close. You’re not supposed to be thinking about that right now. You’re supposed to be thinking about anything _but_ that right now. Like your mother. Get back to her, already.

Right. So the crisis with Jade is easily explained in that way, and the equitable sentiments arising with Kanaya can be justified using similar rhetoric. Only this time, you are responding the way you do not because of a sudden reprieve to loneliness or boredom she offers—you have been many things since entering this game, but none of them have been _unentertained_ —but because of something wholly different: your mother died.

By the way, thank _god_ for that wonderful mechanism in the human brain that makes you forget traumatic events; between the sheer shock of having _Jade Harley_ be the one to reveal to you the fact that your mother had just died and your subsequent descent into grimdarkness, your memory of that day is hazy at best; the only times you’re have any clear recollection of it are in the waking moments right after nightmares, and you are more than happy to let those fade from clarity as fast as possible. 

Despite the fragility of your memory, though, your mother has died, and this is—well, it’s a lot to handle. It’d be a lot to handle if you were still living a normal life in your normal universe and doing all the things that come with that; it’s made even more challenging to come to terms with by the fact that you are a fourteen year old god who can see the future and is currently riding a meteor through the depths of deep space with a cohort of aliens and your paradoxically-related sibling. The absurdity of the whole situation detracts somewhat from the acute feelings surrounding your mother’s death, but they are still there nevertheless, persistent and vicious and generally very not fun to deal with at all. 

You loved her. That’s a fact that, no matter how shitty things got at home with her drinking or between the two of you in general, has never faded from clarity; you loved your mother wholly, entirely, consumingly. If you had to keep playing the game for years on end with there never being a prize, a reprieve, an end in sight, you would have done so willingly if it had meant her staying alive; if it had to be either you or her dying at the hands of Jack, you would have chosen yourself a billion times over without question.

You loved her, and now she is dead.

And, so the narrative you’re attempting to construct goes: enter Kanaya.

You are compensating for loss. You know you are. You miss your mother, inexorably so, and Kanaya is something of an outlet for this. God, not that she is _anything_ remotely like your mother—the little Freud in your head is absolutely _pissing_ himself laughing right now—but rather she is a deep source of comfort for the challenges that new loss has brought, a distraction in the positive sense of the word. Someone who manages to take your mind off your own bullshit with seemingly effortless ease; you wonder sometimes if she’s even remotely _aware_ of how much better just sitting in the same room as her makes you feel. 

And it is only because of the nearly insurmountable quantities of bullshit you have going on right now—read: your mother’s death—that you are becoming so heavily reliant on Kanaya at times; were things going much more swimmingly, so to speak, you are entirely certain that you would not be—well, feeling the way you’re feeling about her right now. 

You’re still just a lonely, stupid kid, after all. You are attaching yourself to the first person willing to deal with you, willing to tolerate you, willing to hold your hand as you sift through all your bullshit piece by piece, and are trying to call it something more than it is in response. Why, you don’t know. 

And you _hate_ this lack of knowledge. You hate it beyond description. It makes you want to throw up, cry, and never speak to anyone ever again. 

When Dave came out, the only thing you could feel for a split second was anger. He had stood there, hands still clenched, gaze not quite focused on you, waiting for a response of some kind and all you had been able to feel was pure, blistering anger. _Why do you get to do this?_ you wanted to scream at him. _Why does this get to be simple for you?_

Which is just fucking _horrible_ for a namer of reasons. One, you know for a fact that this process was not _easy_ for Dave; you have bared painful witness to the number of ways in which your brother’s guardian fucked him up, and the corrosive complex of masculinity he instilled within Dave was matched in size only in its persistence. It has taken the better part of this past year for his walls to come down, for him to be able to work himself out of the mentality that there is only one correct way to be a man, and any deviation from that is weak and deserves vicious punishment. And, not to be trite or anything, but seeing this transformation has been beautiful. The levels to which you are proud of your brother are indescribable, and even if he had been raised by a perfectly functioning person who had never told him that he should have _the sissy in him beaten out onto the fucking concrete,_ you would still feel the exact same. 

And, two, what kind of even vaguely decent person responds to their brother and best friend _coming out_ to them like _that?_ What kind of thoughtless, self-aggrandized bitch sees someone they care about in a moment of such vulnerability and honesty and makes the situation about _themselves_ and _their_ problems? Who fucking _does_ that?

And thirdly, that sort of reaction doesn’t even make _sense._ It directly implies that you have some sort of similar confession to get off your chest. Which you don’t. At all. If you did, you would just _say_ it. You have faced down a bomb supposed to blow you to nothingness, become a vessel for gods, watched your friends bleed out on black-and-white tiles before you; you know what it means to be well and truly _afraid_ , and you know you certainly would not harbor those sentiments if you had to make any sort of similar confession on your part. 

Because that would be ridiculous. Utterly so. 

And you’ve sidetracked again. You reach up to drag your hands through your hair, now clutching your head in your hands. _Great_.

Maybe you’re just crazy. Maybe after god-knows how many years of toeing the line, you have just gone certifiably insane. You should really tell Dave about it; doubtless he has a bet going with at least three separate individuals on this meteor as to how long it’s going to take you to snap. At least some joy can be derived from this mental devolvement into—whatever the fuck you're devolving into. A self-doubting idiot with delusions of being something she’s not. A person whose obsessiveness is matched only by her total inability to set proper boundaries. 

A stupid, scared, confused little girl.

.:.

There are moments, between stints of vicious self-moderation, where you find yourself entirely relaxing around Kanaya.

If you’re being honest, they are infrequent occurrences, though this is not to any fault of hers, of course. Rather the cocktail of your own, expertly-honed breed of stupidity and the ever-present worry about what stands in store for you and your friends the second you arrive at the new session has kept you on edge more often than not as of late. _Tighter than a nun’s asshole,_ Dave tells you at breakfast one time, and both you and Kanaya have to excuse yourselves from the table because you’re laughing too hard.

It’s the moments like that one, really—doubled up at waist, holding onto Kanaya’s arm for support as an undignified snort makes its way out of you—in which you come the closest you ever have with her—hell, with _anyone_ —to letting your guard down. Sometimes it is entirely influenced by circumstances outside of your control—that particular instance, for example, was likely prompted in part by the fact that you had slept for about two and a half hours the night before—but sometimes it just stems from a simple comfort. The sense of comfort being around her gives you.

The genuine sense of safety, too. Like you could say anything, do anything, be anything and would receive nothing but support, nothing but acceptance, nothing but total, complete understanding.

Sometimes you think that’s the driving impetus behind so much of your relationship with Kanaya—the desire to be understood on your part, and the ways in which she meets your incredibly stringent requirements for this both ceaselessly and tirelessly. It’s helpful in a practical sense—strategy meetings always flow well when you two are at the helm, effortlessly riffing off one another, creating tactics and ideas and plans between the two of you with pure ease. She is able to understand nearly every concept you try and break down for her, whether it be the ludicrously complicated inner workings of Sburb, detailed analyses of God Tier titles, or the exact ways in which the Elder Gods interact with the fabric of the rest of the universe, and all the implications them reaching out to a player—to _you_ —had and likely will continue to have for the rest of the session.

It is helpful in the interpersonal sense, too. As the journey progresses, you find yourself less and less reliant on blunt yet infrequent verbalizations to get how you’re feeling across to her; she seems to have picked up on tics and signs from you that you weren’t even aware of expressing in the first place in record timing. Whether this be due to her innate ability to read a room better than anyone you know or the increasing levels of transparency you find yourself flaunting in her company as of late, you cannot say, but regardless, it is so nice that she just _gets it._ Gets you.

And you find yourself _getting it_ in regards to her own emotions, too. You’d already spent what felt like literal days reading and rereading your Pesterchum messages back when you were on LOLAR to better one-up her in your conversations the next day, and your responses to her on the meteor are very much just an extension of that; the same scenario, just a different interface. 

Well, _almost_ the same scenario; though you have been memorizing any and all cues she gives that indicate her various moods or feelings, you are doing so now not to best her in verbal sparring—though those moments are fun as they were over text—but simply because you _want_ to. You want to understand Kanaya. You want to be able to tell when she is having a bad day and try and help her where you can, and you want to know when her days are good, too, so you can share in her happiness. 

And you figure this sort of thing is a two-way street. You cannot go looking for openness and vulnerability from her while simultaneously trying to manage the twenty firewalls you have between your outward front and any genuine emotion you’ve ever experienced. So you make a conscious effort to let your guard slip around her more often. You try and loosen up. You try and remind yourself that, yes, the future you can See is vague at best and bloody at worst, but it is still over two years away, and you have plenty of time to plan adequately; the situation will be no bettered by you having a stick up your ass, alternating between snapping at anyone who looks at you funny or locking yourself away in your room for a full twenty four hours after Kanaya tells you she thinks the color of your hair is pretty.

Doing so is not conducive to building a healthy relationship with Kanaya, and that is what you’re trying to do here, after all: take the friendship you established with the troll back on LOLAR and extend it further, make it more emotionally fulfilling, more close, more—dare you say—affectionate.

Because though your source material is a little limited, you‘re almost certain that’s what friends do: they lower their pretenses, drop their acts, soften up around each other. They let themselves be understood, they let themselves be cared for, and they try to understand and care for the other person in turn, too.

And that’s what the two of you are: friends. Good friends, undeniably, but simply friends all the same. This is, of course, something you are entirely content with; despite your rather rocky relationship with them, you figure the Elder Gods must have been smiling down upon you when they deposited Kanaya Maryam in your inbox. You already have so much of her, more than you could have ever asked for, _certainly_ more than you deserve. 

To desire something additional on top of all that would be pure, inexcusable selfishness.

.:.

You are not in love with Kanaya Maryam.

It’s a simple statement, really. There are no loopholes, no weak spots that invite argument, no opportunities for somehow negating it. It is true in its entirety, completely unquestionable and similarly irrefutable. You are not in love with Kanaya Maryam. You just aren’t.

Do you care for her? Yes. Is she perhaps one of your best friends? Of course. Do you enjoy what your relationship has developed into: one of tactility, of closeness, of open affection where you can manage it? Entirely so.

Do you want it to be more? 

No. _No_ , goddamnit.

She will make someone a fantastic companion one day. She is nurturing and compassionate, ceaseless in her conviction in those around her, affectionate in a way that never feels smothering but never feels forced, either. She is sharp as a whip and one of the most fantastic conversationalists you’ve ever met—one would think that, after months and months of being in incredibly close quarters to one another, you would have grown bored of talking to her at least occasionally, but that has yet to be the case—and side-achingly funny. She is so good at whatever she puts her head to—sewing, drawing, singing, clown hunting, sparring, storytelling, listening—and still manages to be absurdly humble about her innumerable skills. And, not to be colloquial, but she is also drop-dead gorgeous; anyone with half a brain could discern this fact from only one look at her, even if said look happened to be via a heavily pixelated screenshot of a video call. This is not waxing poetic; this is simple, unadulterated truth. Whoever she settles down with in any of her quadrants is an incredibly lucky individual, and you have every intention of communicating this with them when the time arises.

And perhaps your ability to recognize all these traits might detract some credibility from your initial statement, but this is not overly-affectionate pontification; these are factual observations you have been able to make based on your time spent as her friend. Doubtless she has identified a handful of qualities that she does not find entirely repulsive in you, too; that is one of the cornerstones for friendship, after all: appreciating traits within the other. It would almost be weird to not have a list such as that, really. Surely the inability to find at least _one_ thing about Kanaya that you like would indicate a failed relationship on your part, no?

Exactly. You have thought this through several times by now, and are happy to see that it makes just as much sense as always. Maybe it doesn’t all come back to your mother, but it certainly does stem from your lack of ability to separate close friendships with romantic attractions. You are entirely capable of caring about someone the way you care for Kanaya without wanting to—become intimate with them, or anything.

Just because an option is there does not mean you have to take it. If it were applicable to you, you would’ve known it by now. That’s the simple truth of it.

And more to the point, really, Kanaya Maryam is not in love with you. At all. And thank god for it; if she were, you would be deeply concerned, as her reaching that particular conclusion would lead you to believe that some essential fuse in her brain had blown out. And Kanaya’s brain blowing out is not something any of you need right now.

She will make someone a fantastic companion one day. Matesprit, morail, wife—whatever label she chooses to settle under with her partner or partners, she will do so with all the grace and skill and quiet yet fierce passion that she does everything with. This is a simple fact. This is something you have known since you met her.

But you will not be a part of that narrative, at least not directly so. She doesn’t want you to be, obviously, and _you_ don’t want to either. The notion that you do is just laughable, really.

You can’t stop thinking about it, though. For all your attempts to ignore the subject, for all your ardent professions of disinterest mingled with outright aversion, for all your repeated mental insistences that an extension of the relationship you have with Kanaya is not something you want because you are not the sort of person who wants those things, you find it crossing your mind a lot. 

Sometimes, when you are either exhausted to the point of collapse or unspeakably happy, you think it could be nice. A relationship with her of that nature. You think it could be very, very nice. 

That’s usually the point at which you make yourself stop thinking.

.:.

Some days are better than others.

Some days, you find yourself happy to be here. Happy to be on the meteor. Happy to be indulging in three years of relative inactivity with a group of individuals who, despite their rather exuberant personalities, you have come to care for deeply. Happy to have there be no immediate threat hanging over your heads, even if it still looms in the distance, a prick of blinding light against the backdrop of space. You find yourself wholly content on these days, relaxed, comfortable. You are able to sit next to Kanaya without feeling like you are about to explode. You are able to watch Dave and Karkat or Terezi and Vriska interact in the ways that they do without feeling like something is eating you up from the inside out. You are able to allow Kanaya to be affectionate, and allow yourself to return such gestures.

You are able to feel like maybe what you have going on with her is not such a bad thing, even if it is still as vague and undefined as ever on your end. Maybe there is some beauty to be derived from the lack of rigid standards your relationship with her adheres to; maybe there is some beauty in the open-endedness of your feelings for her.

These are the days you wish you could live in forever. A teenager though you may be, you do not like to be miserable, not when you can avoid it. At the very least, it is infinitely more preferable to sit beside the girl you care for deeply, smothering your laughs into her shoulder as she reads aloud passages from one of Karkat’s awful romance novels, the questionable prose and dialogue made all the more hysterical by her dry, deadpan delivery of it.

But these days are not permanent, not even in the slightest. Especially recently.

Recently, you have been keeping to your room more, staying logged out of Pesterchum for large stretches of time, skipping meals with abandon. You try to dress it up as work—even camp out in the library up to your eyes in books to further this pretense more—but more often than not, you simply find yourself laying on your bed, staring up at the ceiling, silent and unmoving.

You don’t even think much. It’s not like you’re having some sort of philosophical jerk-off contest with yourself; you are just _laying_ there, mind blank. Willfully so, it might be worth it to add. As of late, the tracks you try to keep your trains of thought fixed upon have virtually disappeared, leaving the offending carriages to careen around your brain at random, you totally powerless to stop it. They make you unsteady and irrational; they lead you to conclusions you know you would’ve never reached were you even remotely within your right mind.

Conclusions about yourself. Conclusions about your friends. Conclusions about Kanaya.

Today, you have decided, you are not getting out of bed. You’re not entirely sure what you hope to accomplish by this course of action—if anything, the inactivity of remaining in your room all day will only make your thoughts harder to ignore—but you’ve decided it's a good one, the _best_ one all the same. 

And, anyways, getting out of bed also feels sort of impossible at this point. Not only do you feel like you couldn’t move if doing so was the most imperative thing in the world, but the notion of stepping outside of your room and interacting with anyone is enough to make your stomach hurt. Even on the best of days it is hard to keep yourself grounded, focused on the conversations or activities around you instead of every molecule of space between your body and Kanaya’s, or the way Dave always kisses Karkat’s cheek first thing at breakfast, or the heavy feeling in the pit of your stomach that never fully seems to go away; on a day like today, you wouldn’t last five minutes before losing your mind.

Or just dissolving into tears. Equally unappealing prospects.

You doze off at some indeterminable point. Your dreams are typically filled with the sort of content that would make Freud do backflips were he still around to psychoanalyze you, and today’s round is no different. Because apparently the gods don’t _totally_ hate you yet, you only remember bits and pieces: a hole blown through the universe, a familiar pair of black-tinted lips, blood pooling on the floor around you, red and jade; your first, rather dazed thought upon jerking awake is _Christmas colors._ Your second is a rather long, creative stream of expletives that does very little to make you feel better.

It takes you a second to realize why you’ve woken up in the first place—someone is knocking at your door, rather insistently. Rolling onto your side, you bite back a groan and start debating between feigning sleep or telling whoever it is to consider very hard whether or not their repeated assault against your door is worth the potential of you turning them into a rat, or something, when the person outside speaks.

“Rose? Are you in there?” 

It’s Kanaya, voice lilted with concern. 

God fucking _damnit_. 

You should ignore her. It is absolutely essential to _everything_ that you do not let her into your goddamn room, Lalonde, do you understand? 

“It’s unlocked,” you say into your arm. Clearly not.

The knocking stops, replaced by a brief pause in which you can imagine her standing outside, staring at your door handle, weighing her options: deal with your miserable ass or abscond. You find yourself praying for the wrong option there entirely too hard, which only serves to make you feel somehow even worse about yourself, and it’s almost a relief when the sound of your door creaking open interrupts all that.

Deadened by exhaustion and general malaise as it may be, the now-familiar buzz you feel upon seeing Kanaya is still prevalent, shooting up your spine as she appears. She’s dressed in a simple black sweater and her acclaimed red skirt, her ears proudly boasting the little sun earrings you got her for Twelfth Pedigree’s Eve. You try to offer her up a small smile; granted, given the fact that you are currently laying in a fetal position on top of your covers, it probably doesn’t convey much of the reassurance you’re shooting for. But Kanaya still returns the gesture—albeit tensely—as she hovers on the threshold, one hand still on the doorframe, the other smoothing over her skirt repeatedly.

She looks tired. She looks strained.

You’re saved from doing something deeply regretful—like attempting to put together a sentence in an attempt to explain anything that’s going on with you right now—by Kanaya jerking her head a little, as if shaking a fly off, and moving suddenly, crossing the room in a few quick strides. She makes it to the edge of your bed, where she falters somewhat, hovering beside you like she doesn’t know where to go now. The air around you almost tastes sour with worry; Kanaya’s glow flickers, a telltale sign of uncertainty from her that you’ve come to learn. 

Despite the fact that you know you really, really should, you still can’t find it within you to sit up. To brush this aside like you want to, like you should. To act normal.

God, why can’t you just be _normal?_

It’s a sickening relief when Kanaya finally sits, lowering herself onto the edge of your bed a foot away from where your face is. Her hand reaches out to you but stops, hovering in midair, fingers slowly curling into a fist as she pulls it back. She opens her mouth, familiar jet-black lips parting, and then snaps it closed. You can see a muscle working in her jaw, see the way her nails bite into her palms, see the thin line forming between her eyebrows; her body, her silent signs, her nonverbal cues, they are practically a second language to you by now, one you swear you understand even better than the English you ardently proclaim to be proficient in so often. You can read her emotions as clearly as if they were your own even on the worst of days, even on the days where your words come sluggish and your thoughts too fast and the entire world around you feels jarring and wrong, you yourself standing out like a puzzle piece just a little too misshapen to fit its mould.

Even on days like today, you can read her.

And right now, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what she’s thinking: she has no clue what to do with you.

Which is just so, so fitting, because you don’t know what to do with yourself in the slightest, either. There is no plan here anymore, no order of operations, and as much as you hate playing by the rules, you would give your right arm and all the non-damaged parts of your psyche for there to be some semblance of guidelines for you to adhere to here. You‘re starting to well and truly flounder without them recently.

Hell, who are you kidding? You’ve been floundering for a long, long time.

The realization leaves you breathless with fear. Something starts to tighten in the back of your throat.

“You missed breakfast,” Kanaya says. Her hand is sort of hovering above you again, like she can’t tell whether or not touching you would be a good idea. Whether or not she wants to.

Because how could she want to? How could anyone, let alone _her_ , want to touch you—you, Rose Lalonde, harbinger of the shitty gods and the even shittier visions; Rose Lalonde, fourteen years old over-compensating for the laundry-list of personal defects she can’t help but shake no matter what she does; Rose Lalonde, the freak, the weirdo, the girl who likes—

“Rose?”

Her voice is so soft, so gentle that it almost hurts. You want to cling to it, immerse yourself in her tone, have it be the only sound that ever plays out internally. You want hers to be the sole voice you hear in your head; no matter what it is saying, if it’s in her voice, her incomparably beautiful voice, you think you would be able to listen to it gladly.

“That’s my name,” you mumble. “Don’t wear it out.”

She laughs a little at that. You think. “Well, at least your snark is still intact.”

“Small victories.”

“You also missed dinner.” Her hands flex in her lap. “And breakfast the day before. And—”

“Okay, okay.” You make an attempt at waving her comments away; it’s made a little challenging by the fact your whole body feels like it’s been injected with lead. “Point illustrated.”

“Actually, the point was that I’m worried about you.” Her hands flex again. "Which I don’t think I illustrated quite as explicitly.” 

Something clenches hard in the pit of your stomach. You will anything articulate to come out of your mouth—a logical explanation to this, preferably, but, really, _any_ sort of response to her would be fantastic—but your brain remains blissfully blank; there’s something as distracting as ever about Kanaya admitting she cares about you, at least enough to worry. 

“I’m fine,” you finally manage to tell her knee. 

The girl attached to it gives a disbelieving huff. “Somehow I doubt that."

You can almost feel her hand still hovering above you, and the force of how much you just want her to _touch you_ already would’ve knocked you off your feet were you not already laying down. You swallow. Suddenly, you are too tired and too sick of everything to care about saying the right thing now. “At any rate, it’s hardly your issue to feel obliged to deal with. I’m managing quite well on my own.” Your lips quirk. “Clearly.”

“I’m not here because I feel obliged to do anything, Rose.”

You’re not sure how to reply to that. The back of your throat is starting to feel tight. “All I’m saying is I won’t fault you for leaving. It—this—” You shake your head a little, frustration biting at your insides. “I’m fine,” you settle on again, lamely. 

“You don’t have to be.” Despite waiting for it for what feels like years, it’s still a surprise when Kanaya's hand finally drops down onto your shoulder, and you don’t manage to hold back your flinch. She makes a little distressed-sounding noise in the back of her throat and pulls away. _Fuck_.

“You can—” It takes you a second to swallow. “You can—I don’t mind if you—” Another swallow. You close your eyes for a moment. “Please.”

“Touch you?”

You nod, feeling sick with embarrassment all of a sudden. God, you’re being so _stupid_. So stupid and childish and _weird._

Some of it must show on your face—ever the impassive wall you are, _truly_ —because Kanaya makes another noise in the back of her throat. With a gentleness that makes the inside of your nose sting painfully, she slips her hand to your cheek and slowly guides you into a sitting position, your shins digging into her side in a way that must be painful; if it is, though, she doesn’t show it in the slightest. Her eyes are the same yellow-green as they are, wide and worried, searching you for something. Her hand has not left your face; her thumb traces over the ridge of your cheekbone, fingers curling in the hair at your temple. The smell of jasmine fills your nose, heady and comforting. 

She is so, so beautiful it makes your chest hurt. 

“You do no disservice in asking for physical comfort from me, Rose,” Kanaya says, and she takes your hand with her free one, lacing your fingers together. Some observation about how well they fit together, as if your appendages had been carved for her hand and hers alone, floats to the top of your mind, and you try your best to beat it back under with a broom. “I hope I have never made you feel as if you do, and if I have, I am so, so sorry.”

You just shake your head. Something in you tells you not to trust your voice right now. 

“Do you know why I worry about you?”

Your throat constricts some more. Your vision is starting to blur at the edges, and Kanaya’s hand is so _warm,_ so warm and soft and comforting you feel like you’re about to explode into a billion pieces. 

The urge to scream at her to get away, to move back from her, to lock yourself in this room for the next two years and never set eyes on her again is almost overpowering. And yet you also want to stay in this position until the Green Sun really does blow up. You settle on just shaking your head.

“Because I care about you.” Kanaya says, face softening, and drags her thumb over your cheek again. “I care very deeply for you, Rose Lalonde. You have been through such an extraordinary amount of hardship and have come out the other side, still a wholly kind and compassionate and beautiful individual, and I think that is one of the most admirable things ever.” Her lips twitch a little. “Not a skill many of us possess, I’m afraid.”

You shake your head again. “You do,” you say, voice rasping a little. “Kanaya, you—you’re—” _Beautiful. Special. Something that has made every awful thing that has ever happened or will ever happen in this game worth it and then some._ “—good. You’re good.”

Kanaya just smiles at that, a little sadly, and moves both her hands to cup at your jaw. “It makes me very sad to see you struggling,” she says. “I don’t say that as an encouragement for you to not express your feelings should they arise, obviously, but it is true.” The gold in her eyes glints a little. “You do not deserve to feel like this. You have done so much good for this universe. For your friends. For mine.” She blinks. “For me.”

_God_.

“You deserve so much, Rose.” Kanaya runs her thumbs over your jawline. “You deserve everything wonderful in this world and then some. That’s why I’m here: to remind you of that.”

“Why are you so nice to me?”

Oh, fuck, you had not meant to say that out loud. You had meant to say literally anything than that self-pitying horseshit out loud. _Fuck._

But Kanaya just smiles again, face completely devoid of any judgement, any irritation, any repulsion—how can she do this: look at you, be around you, touch you without wanting to recoil or back off or run away?—and runs her fingers through your hair again. 

How can she do this?

“Because it’s you,” she says. Like that’s it. Like it’s never going to be more complicated than that.

And then you are crying. 

You sort of just curl forward into her, suddenly unable to hold yourself up against the waves of sobs that crash into you; your throat has closed up and your head is spinning and each breath you try and take is jagged and broken in the middle, catching in the back of your throat in ugly, embarrassing gasps. You are aware, of course, that this is a _ridiculous_ display; you need to get it together _now._ You need to stop—stop crying, stop touching her, just stop everything you’re doing with Kanaya right this second. 

But Kanaya wraps her arms around you like it’s nothing, like it isn’t wrong or weird for you to be like this, and she starts whispering something in your ear— _it’s okay,_ you think—and she is so warm, so soft and gentle and fucking _warm_ you can feel your heart shattering in your chest, the broken pieces tearing the insides of your lungs as you just lay against her and _sob._

“I’m sorry,” you try and say, and you are apologizing for much more than this. “I’m so sorry.”

She just lets you bury your face in her neck, pulling you to her, still whispering _it’s okay, you’re okay_ in your ear, her hands carding through your hair, smoothing across your back, wiping away the tears running down your neck, and it hits you that you will never, ever deserve something like this. Not from anyone, and especially not from her. 

But she does not act like that; she just holds you and soothes you and _cares_ about you effortlessly, as easy as breathing, and it makes you feel so much more than you know how to express. 

It makes you feel scared, you think, even as you sit here, your breathing finally steadying, sobs receding, exhaustion starting to claw at the edges of your vision, pulling you down into sleep. It makes you feel so scared.

.:.

When you wake up, you’re half-curled up in her lap, face pressed into her stomach. She’s shifted so that she’s leaning against your headboard, legs extended out; your own are wrapped around hers, a position you do not remember getting into before you fell asleep. One of her hands is running through your hair, smoothing stray strands back, tucking them behind your ears whenever they fall loose. The other is resting on your shoulder, tracing faint patterns across your skin. You are under the covers, blankets pulled tight around you. She is not, and you feel so, so deeply relieved by this. Something tells you that would have been the final straw.

After a second, you realize that the patterns she’s tracing on your arm are not meaningless—she is writing something out, something that feels suspiciously like your own name—and then _that’s_ the final straw.

The panic and guilt come as they always do: in a blistering rush that overwhelms you instantly, leaving you both exhausted and wired at the same time, volatile, as if you are about to explode. Suddenly you are too close, _beyond_ too close, and it’s suffocating. You need to move. You need to stop this right now.

You need her to leave. You want her to stay so badly it hurts, but it is absolutely imperative to the narratives in your head, to your fragile sense of self, to your ability to get out of bed and walk around and pretend that you are a normal person living a normal life in which nothing fundamental has or ever will change that she leaves. _Now_.

And yet you don’t want her to. Despite the panic filling the gaps between every atom of air in your lungs, clawing its way up your throat, making your eyes sting with pain, you do not want her to leave. You don’t want her anywhere but here: wrapped around you, hand in your hair, writing your name out with her finger; you want to live in this stupidly, embarrassingly intimate moment forever. You want to feel as if it is okay to do so—God, you just want to feel okay; why is it so hard to feel okay still? Why is it so hard to sit next to her and occupy the same spaces and not feel as if you are so wrong for doing so, as if you are damaging the very sanctity the fabric of this universe holds by simply existing?

Why is it so hard to exist as you are? Why is it still so fucking _hard?_

You sit up a little faster than you intended, maybe, and Kanaya jerks back in surprise; you untangle yourself from her, immediately putting a good two feet of space between you and pressing your head back against the wall behind you to steady yourself as your vision swims; you half-wonder just how long you were out for before deciding that’s really not a question you want answered at all right now. You can feel her watching as you pull your knees to your chest, wrapping your arms around your shins, and fix your gaze on the bedspread before you. You know she knows these signs from you—closing off, pulling yourself away, re-establishing up the firewalls you were so stupid to let down in the first place—and the concern you can feel in her gaze as it burns through you hurts so, so much.

The realization that this is no longer something you can do hits slowly, spreading over you lazily, like the waves at Coney Island you remember seeing a lifetime and a universe ago when you were small. The ocean had felt freezing when you had stepped into it for the first time as a child, the icy water almost burning away at your skin, and you are shocked by the similarity of that sensation to how you are feeling now: cold from the inside out. As if your body already knows you are about to separate yourself from the one inexorable source of warmth in your life, the only thing keeping the permanent chill in your bones at bay sometimes.

Because that is what you are about to do, of course. You have made one too many mistakes. You have made one too many allowances on your part, carried on with a charade that was already demanding so much from Kanaya while still silently wanting more, more, more.

More from her. More _of_ her. 

And this absurd way of thinking about things is _your_ cross to bear; Kanaya is in no way responsible for picking up slack in this matter at _all_. She’s your _friend_. That is all she has ever been, and you are starting to get carried away in a manner that sickens you to watch. It is beyond unfair to continue subjecting someone you care for so deeply to these parts of yourself and expect her to—God, whatever the _fuck_ you’re expecting from her right now. Sympathy? Understanding?

_Love?_

No. Not that. Not in that way, because you don’t—that’s not how you feel; that can’t be how you feel.

The backs of your eyes burn with sudden viciousness, and, to your horror, the next time you blink you feel tears spilling out onto your cheeks for the second time that day. It isn’t like your earlier outburst, though; there is no tidal wave rushing forward, crashing into you with full force, leaving you breathless and shaky. You are not overwhelmed by a strange, vicious sadness that tears you up from the inside out, works its way out of you in the form of incoherent sobbing.

No, you are just tired now. So fucking tired.

Is it so wrong to want love from her? Does it have to be so wrong?

Your vision fractures, the image of the bedspread in front of you sliding out of focus as tears continue to fill your vision as fast as you can clear them away. It is wrong. You know it is. You are asking something of her she cannot give, and something you do not deserve—you do not _need_ —to receive in the first place. That is virtually the dictionary definition for _wrong_.

“Rose?” Kanaya says beside you, worry practically pooling from her words, and, god, you can’t do this, you can’t do this, you can’t fucking do this anymore. She reaches out to you, an unmistakable flash of hurt crossing her face as you pull away. “Are you—Rose, please, what’s—”

“I think I need to make something clear.”

Despite the tears, your voice comes out deadened and flat, almost robotic. You resist the urge to close your eyes, to block out the presence of the girl beside you in its entirety, to pretend you are simply speaking to the walls, to your books, to yourself. Instead, you focus on the sheets in front of you so hard you almost go cross-eyed.

“Okay,” Kanaya says, whispers, voice suddenly shaky.

Is it so wrong to love her? Is it so wrong to want her to love you, too?

_Yes_ , you think vehemently, bitterly, exhaustedly. _Yes, it fucking is._

“We are friends.” You wet your lips, taste salt on them, feel your throat constrict even more, and cough once to clear it. This is for everyone’s benefit, you remind yourself; hers because it will relieve her of any obligation she feels towards you, and you so you can put a pin in this travesty you’ve let unfold around you once and for all.

You know who you are, and you are not this. You cannot be this.

“We are friends,” you repeat, your voice a little shakier, “and it goes without saying how that means a great deal to me. I—I hope there has never been any doubt in your mind regarding this. I certainly have never been one for transparency, and even though I have attempted to modify this behavior somewhat in your presence as of late, I feel the mark might have been missed on more than one occasion, so I wanted to make that explicitly clear now. You mean a great deal to me, Kanaya. More—” You swallow back the rest of that sentence, the _more than you could ever know_ dying on your lips; somehow, it feels very counterintuitive to what you’re about to say next. “—well, you know.”

“I do,” Kanaya says, and it sounds like both a question and a statement.

You nod, running your hands up and down your shins for a moment. “Quite.”

Kanaya just blinks at you, face carefully arranged into an expression of neutrality now. Her defenses are going up, she’s preparing for the worst from you right now, and a not-so-small part wonders what would happen if you swallowed back the rest of this tirade, too, and let whatever is happening between the two of you unfold without interference.

It sounds both a nauseating and ridiculously wonderful prospect; you lean into the former sentiment and press on, digging your nails into your palms.

“As you may or may not have picked up on back there, I have been a little out of sorts as of late. Nothing you or anyone has a hand in fixing, but it has rendered me somewhat—” You struggle to find the right word for a second; god, and to think you used to want to be a writer. “—dependent.”

“Dependent,” Kanaya echoes. Her voice has taken on a flat, hard quality, and it’s somehow a billion times worse than the shaking.

You dig your nails in harder and force a nod out. “I feel that’s an appropriate phrase. And while I am, as always, indescribably grateful for your support, I do not want to give any misleading impressions regarding the—”

Fuck. _Fuck_.

“—the nature of my feelings for you.”

Beside you, Kanaya lets out a long, slow breath.

This is for your own good. This is the only option you have left if you want to preserve anything you have built up regarding yourself. Reinvention is not a luxury you can or particularly want to afford yourself: not now, not ever.

This is the right thing to do, but more importantly. it’s the _necessary_ thing to do. This was always the outcome to the path you had set yourself on the second you set foot on this meteor; maybe if you had drawn the lines in concrete rather in the sand, or at least not stood stupidly by as wave after wave came in and blew them into oblivion. Maybe if you had established boundaries when Kanaya had given you the chance.

Maybe if you had never listened to your mother that one-off time as a child, if you had not fallen down the rabbit hole of psychosexual theorizing and internet chatrooms, if you had never spoken to Jade, you wouldn’t have to do this now. Maybe, maybe, maybe; everything swings in the balance of the fucking _maybe_.

But you did: that’s the whole point. You did all of that, and you did it knowing what would happen in the end: this. You dug your own grave here. You let yourself think for one, brief second, maybe, that you and Kanaya were—

“We’re friends,” you say aloud, a bite to your voice. To confirm it, to set it in stone. “We’re just friends, Kanaya. Clearly there’s been some misinterpretation among us, and it would be stupid of me to continue pretending that I’m—comfortable with this. With how we’ve become.”

You watch the column of Kanaya’s throat shift as she swallows. Her expression is tight in a way that lends more than a little credibility to the notion that she’s about away from bursting into tears, and you have to bite down on the inside of your cheek until the taste of iron floods your mouth to keep yourself talking. 

It doesn’t matter. None of that shit matters anymore.

“You’re asking something of me that I cannot give, and it’s untenable on both our parts to act as if this is not causing issues.” You give a vague, sweeping gesture between the two of you. “Clearly, it is, and—and we are just friends, Kanaya. That’s all we ever have been, and that’s all we’ll ever be."

_That’s all we can be. That’s all I know how to be. That’s all I know how to let myself be to you, and that’s all you think of me, I’m certain, because you are you and I am Rose fucking Lalonde and I cannot be this way; I cannot entertain the notion of being this way anymore._

“Okay?"

This whole process would be much easier if you believed a genuinely single thing coming out of your mouth right now. It would also be a lot easier if Kanaya was not looking at you like you had just stabbed her in the stomach.

Not that you’re looking at Kanaya right now; you would honestly rather gouge your own eyes out that see the tangible proof of just how badly you have destroyed everything you’d built with her in a few, succinct sentences. But her gaze is piercing as ever, and right now you can feel it roving over you, the disbelief and shock and confusion in it reading like letters on a page. She's searching, looking for something in you.

_Let me know when you find it; god knows I’ve been searching for years, too,_ you want to say, but don’t. Instead, you clear your throat, coughing the ever-persistent knot away, and bring your blade up to deliver the killing blow.

“I think you should leave now.”

You can almost feel the metaphorical blood spray up into your face as Kanaya just stares at you for a second, dead silent.

“What?” she finally says, and her voice is so small and soft that you well and truly want to throw yourself off the side of this aggrandized rock and rot away in the depths of deep space.

“Go.” Your voice rings in your ears. “Please.”

Kanaya remains sitting on the other side of the bed, hands gripped together in her lap, emotions flitting across her face at light speed. For one, long second, you think she is going to refuse to leave. 

For a fractionally longer one, you want her to. 

But then she stands, almost abruptly, and you focus very hard on the feeling of your nails still biting into your palms and not the tangible feeling of loss her walking away from you gives you. _This is for your own good_ repeats in the back of your head, looping over and over like an old VHS tape; you know this is for your own good.

Kanaya stops with the door half open to look back at you. Her gaze burns through as always, and you turn your head to the side a little to avoid it. 

You do not look at her. You cannot look at her right now.

The sigh Kanaya heaves is tired beyond compare. “I’m sorry.”

As if she had something— _anything—_ to be sorry about here. As if it isn’t all on you.

And then, just like that, Kanaya turns on her heel and steps outside. She closes your door behind her with a soft _click_ , and just like that, you’re all alone.

.:.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oops :-)


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> absolutely SO TIRRED rn ... who invented aps! who! bad idea! i proofread this chap like twice so i am so sorry for any spelling mistakes im literally illiterate BUT i hope yall enjoy mwah

\-- tentacleTherapist [TT] began pestering grimAuxiliatrix [GA] \--

TT: For both our sakes, I’ll keep this brief.

TT: My dismissal of you was needlessly abrupt, and I’m sorry for that. Again, I’ve been out of sorts.

TT: That’s not a justification or an excuse, and I by no means am expecting anything resembling forgiveness from you right now.

TT: Regardless, though, I'm sorry.

TT: It’s nothing against you at all, believe me. I just don’t know what I’m doing anymore, and it’s not fair on either of us for me to pretend that I do and rope you in alongside me.

TT: That’s not fair to you.

TT: But I really, truly meant what I said about caring for you, Kanaya. I do.

TT: Just in a different way than I think my actions allude to.

TT: The alternative is not something I’m particularly well versed in beyond the extent of knowing it isn’t something that applies to me. And it’s not fair to rope you into that either.

\-- grimAuxiliatrix [GA] has logged off! --

TT: Fuck.

.:.

You know another dream bubble has hit the meteor when you wake up to a faceful of sand.

You groan, rolling onto your back, blinking sleep from your eyes. The sound of crashing waves fills your ears; again, you are brought back to childhood trips to Coney Island, but they just make you grimace now. Something about negative association. Plus, you’re sick of being cold all the time, and thinking about the ocean there—steel gray and unforgiving, like a bowl of liquid lead—makes your stomach tighten.

Again, that might just be the negative association talking, but you’re in no mood to dissect the finer parts of your psyche that offers up, so you brush the thoughts aside and pull yourself into a seated position.

Out of all the ones you’ve encountered, this particular dream bubble is one of your favorites, really. For starters, it is not yours, so there is no awkward explaining to do, no questions from your friends or the dancestors as to why they keep waking up in impossibly empty mansions or black-and-white tiled courtyards splattered with blood. You can simply revel in the significant bits of someone else’s consciousness for a change.

Also, it’s warm here. It’s warm and beautifully sunny and you make a mental note to tell Kanaya about this when she wakes; she’s been complaining about lack of proper sunlight on the meteor for months now, and maybe if you can work out a way to send her to this particular dream bubble, it’ll help her. Then you remember that you have not talked to Kanaya in two days and that this is likely not a streak you are going to break anytime soon. Honestly, the only reason you cannot say with a hundred percent certainty that she’s blocked you on Pesterchum is because you have yet to check out of fear that you’ll prove yourself right.

You know what, scratch that. You hate this dream bubble now.

But you’re here anyways, so you might as well make the most of it. At any rate, dream bubbles are infinitely preferable to regular dreams. Even if the bubbles originate from the more locked-away parts of your mental landscape, you are at least still fully conscious and in control of the proceedings around you; with regular dreams, it’s like playing Russian roulette with the all the things you’ve devoted months and months of your waking hours to not thinking about, and somehow you always end up getting shot in the end.

Recently, the bullets have been coming up jade, so to speak, and that only makes you all the more grateful for this dream bubble, as adverse as the setting has suddenly become.

And it’s still nice to be warm for once. Even if it’s not something you can share with Kanaya anymore.

You walk around the landscape for a while. It’s mostly just sand and water, with a few trees and shacks dotted around. At some points, the landscape blends with that reminiscent of Derse, all purple walls and arching towers and gothic architecture, and it makes you feel a strange sort of reminiscent. It’s only been a year, really, since you last set foot on the planet, since your mission to the Green Sun, but it feels like you’ve lived lifetimes upon lifetimes within those twelve months.

You wonder, idly, as you meander through a crop of trees, making your way up to the top of a hill, if there will ever be a point in which it stops feeling like you’ve lived your whole life and then some in such short periods of times. You wonder at what point you will feel as if you’ve finally got a handle on time as it passes; you wonder if something like that will ever be afforded to you, or if you’ll simply spend the rest of your days feeling as if you have been left behind by your own self, your brain struggling to make sense of the things around you while the rest of you shoots far ahead, worlds away after only a few minutes.

There’s tangibility in that metaphor somewhere, but it makes you inexplicably sad to think about, so you don’t. You give your head a little shake and reach out to grab onto the branches of one of the trees, hauling yourself up the lip of the hill. You pause once you’ve made it, leaning against the bark, and you’ve almost started to relax when the sound of voices—oddly familiar voices—drifts over to you. You squint through some of the low-lying branches, and—

_Fuck_.

One day, you are going to find this very funny. Hysterical, even. You will have reached the point in which your life is not a rapidly devolving series of ludicrous catastrophes, and you will be able to look back upon this exact moment and just laugh.

Today, though, is not that day. In fact, the sight of what appears to be Kanaya and her dancestor seated in the center of the clearing your vantage point overlooks doesn’t incite amusement in you so much as it incites the urge to repeatedly beat your head against the tree beside you.

Your first thought is that, seated among the leaves, dappled sunlight falling around her, her knees pulled to her chest, chin tilted up to the sky, Kanaya looks extraordinarily pretty. Your second thought consists of a somewhat tangential rampage about how those are the exact sorts of things you’re not supposed to be thinking about Kanaya anymore; you do your best to ignore it.

Your third thought is that she looks very, very tired. Your fourth consists of a rather overwhelming surge of guilt, its impetus a little lost on you.

It is, of course, beyond creepy to stand in the trees and watch your friend have what is, by the looks of it, a very private conversation with her dancestor. It’s creepy and invasive and weird in an actual sense you can recognize. If someone were to do this to you, even her, you would be irked, and rightly so; the rules should be and are not any different for her.

Then you hear what sounds distinctly like Kanaya saying your name, and it’s like your feet have been superglued to the ground.

You can’t make out much more than that; despite the rather flailing gestures and groans of exasperation she lets out intermittently, Kanaya speaks softly, Porrim even more so. At some point, it sounds like the latter says “not your fault,” to which Kanaya replies by dropping her head into her hands and groaning again. She sits like that for a while, and you watch as Porrim reaches out to rub her shoulder in silence.

Though her face is still angled downwards when she speaks, you can hear Kanaya’s next words as clearly as if she’s standing right next to them shouting them into your ear.

“I don’t know what to do about her.”

And it’s miraculous, really, how fast you are suddenly able to stand up and away after that. Even more so that you don’t manage to slip and fall down the slope; you sort of stagger to a halt at the bottom and drop yourself to the ground, pressing the heels of your hands into your eyes.

A lot of thoughts come to your head. None of them are helpful. You still think them anyways, and it takes you a very long time to find it in yourself to stand back up.

.:.

You are fourteen and a half years old when you jerk awake from another dream of fangs and tape measures and sticky washes of jade blood pooling around your feet.

You sit in your bed, bolt upright for a second, blinking away the remnants of the image, and try and fight your breathing back down to a manageable level. Though Kanaya has been a prominent feature in your dreams as of late—much to the unending delight of the little Freud that refuses to leave the back of your mind no matter how hard you will it to happen—the ones like this, where the imagery obviously alludes to her dying are few and far between, made all the more unsettling by their frequency.

Honestly, you think as you haul yourself out of bed and into your bathroom, you’re not sure what they mean. Maybe that you’re repressed. Maybe that you really need to go to therapy. Probably both.

Your visage is an unwelcome sight in the bathroom mirror—you’re convinced that you looked better than this when you had actually just been blown to a billion pieces by a bomb—but you bear it with a grimace and turn the tap on. The cold water helps. You stay there for a long time, even after you’ve finished washing your face, staring yourself down in the mirror, hands gripping the sides of the sink.

And it's funny, really, how ground-breaking revelations play out; one second you are trying to come up with an appropriate descriptor for the exact shade of purple the shadows under your eyes have turned, and the next you realize, quite suddenly, that you have been wrong about everything.

You are saved from throwing up in the sink again only by the fact that you have not eaten very much in the past few days. The nausea that slams into you like an eighteen-wheeler is still very noticeable, though, and you haunch over against it, pressing your forehead against the cool ceramic of the basin, half-wheezing.

No, you haven’t. Don’t be fucking idiotic. You know yourself. You know who you are. You know all the innate characteristics there are to know about you, and have since you were a child. You’ve been over all of these things a billion and one times by now; none of this is novel information, and none of it should be things you are still having trouble processing.

But that’s not true, not really. The more you stand there and think about it, the pounding in your head deafening, the more you realize that it just isn’t true.

You really don’t know anything, do you? Not about the world. Not about this game. Certainly not about yourself.

And haven’t the signs always been there? When you think about it, it’s not a hard puzzle to put together: the chatrooms, Freud, Jade, the Green Sun, Dave; in retrospect, it’s so glaringly obvious you want to slap yourself for ever thinking it was something you could just ignore. Avoid. Turn the other cheek to.

Then you want to slap yourself for thinking this is something you could even _dream_ of embracing. And then you want to slap yourself for thinking that, because, really, how stupid can you get? Clinging to antiquated ideals—ones that originated from a universe no longer in existence, no less—is as unintelligent as it is embarrassing. You know this. God, sometimes you think for all your alleged powers of foresight and pseudo-prophetic intelligence, this is all you know.

It doesn’t make you feel much better, though. The age-old panic is still trying to fight its way out of you tooth and nail; now you just know it’s origination, and the realization is much less impactful than you thought it would be.

Because, okay, sure, you have strong feelings for Kanaya, and those feelings are perhaps on a plane different to the one you’ve been attempting to look at them from for the past year, and sure, maybe you are finally recognizing this at face value after an equal period of time spent trying to ignore it through whatever means necessary, but—

But then what? What are you supposed to do now? The thought of establishing that sort of connection with her makes your skin crawl in a way you still can’t fully explain, and even if you were fully willing to embrace this revelation just like that—and god, what a turnaround _that_ would be—any chance you had with Kanaya has been blown entirely out of the water.

By you.

_I think you should leave now._

Because you’re an idiot.

_I don’t know what to do with her._

You groan into the sink, the sound reverberating off the bathroom walls. You are so, so stupid.

_Go. Please._

Oh, god. What the fuck are you supposed to do now?

.:.

You try and write it in your journal.

You reason that, at the very least, no one is going to see this but you. If it turns out you’re wrong, or you decide you’re not going to deal with this again, you can simply cross things out, or erase it, or tear the page out, crumple it up, set it on fire and throw the ashes into the bowels of the meteor. Whatever works, really.

That doesn’t make it any easier, though. You spend twenty minutes just sitting there, pen in hand, blank page staring up at you—you could be going crazy, but it really does feel like it’s mocking you—and write absolutely nothing. Your pen doesn’t even touch the paper; the most you can do is get it to hover an inch above the page before you feel so dizzy you have to put your head in your hands.

As always, your total and comprehensive lack of mastery over the English language never fails to astound you. Truly a childhood wasted, then.

In more ways than that, you think, and the notion makes you so indescribably sad for a second it’s hard to breathe.

Perhaps there’s some irony there: you spent the better part of your entire preteen years attempting to convince yourself you were something it’s looking more and more like you’re not; now as you transition into your teenage years, your earlier pushbacks against your true nature are being replaced by a stagnant sort of hopelessness.

Because what good is it, simply knowing who you are, if you don’t know how to be that? The acquiring of new knowledge doesn’t make you feel as it normally does: powerful, competent, in control; rather you feel just as lost and stupid as before. You only have a name for your problem, not a cure.

Not that it’s a _problem_ , per say, just—

God, whatever. You throw your pen down and slam your journal shut with a bitter snort. Your writing career was always going to go up in flames, anyways.

.:.

After a period of time you’ve decided to label as something between three and four days, you finally leave your room.

It’s entirely out of necessity, which is to say, you want coffee. No, scratch that, you _need_ coffee. These are desperate, desolate times you find yourself in now, and though you are silently thanking Dave for cajoling you into installing that mini fridge in your room a few months back, the one substance you did not stockpile on was caffeine, and it’s rapidly becoming a situation in need of immediate adjustment now.

If you’re being honest with yourself, it’s not entirely because you have no desire to go to sleep and fall into another dream bubble, though you would love to avoid those as much as possible from here on out. Your true motivations are a little more other-oriented than that.

Read: you, Rose Lalonde, are lonely. You are lonely and you miss your friends.

You are lonely and you miss Kanaya. But that’s sort of a moot point by now.

It’s strange how, even though only a few days has passed since the beginning of your self-imposed isolation, everyone in the common room stops dead in the middle of their activities the second you show your face to stare at you like you’re Jesus Christ himself returning from the grave. Terezi actually pauses with a spoonful of cereal halfway to her mouth, the burnt-out red of her eyes flashing at you over the rims of her glasses.

“Lo and _fucking_ behold, she lives!”

It’s nice to know that, even though the world around you as you know it has rather upended itself at your feet over the course of the last few days, there will always be some constants to the universe. The particularly shrill volume at which Karkat Vantas seems intent on speaking at regardless of the situation being one.

You afford him a dry smile from the doorway; Dave, seated beside him, face studiously blank, hisses “dude” at him under his breath.

Karkat merely rolls his eyes to the heavens at that—you suppose this is just his emotionally stunted way of communicating the fact that he was worried about you—and opens his mouth, likely to launch on some sort of tirade. You’re even going to put in at least a little effort to paying attention to it as you get yourself some coffee when, _lo and fucking behold_ , Kanaya walks out of the kitchen, coffee pot in hand.

There is a very long, very painful silence that follows the second she locks eyes with you; for a second, she just looks a little surprised, as if she had forgotten you were on this meteor with her. Then, like someone’s flipped a switch, her expression goes carefully blank, and she starts staring at the pot in her hands like it’s the most fascinating thing to ever grace the surface of this meteor.

You’re not sure what you look like right now. Probably very stupid.

There are about a billion things you want to say to her: most are rather profuse and probably a little emotional apologies; many of the remainder are comments or confessions you really shouldn’t make, given the current audience; about three of them would end with you in tears again.

You open your mouth to allow forth one of these things, and the only words that come out are: “I came to get an apple.”

God, one day you are going to force Dave into setting up a time loop so you can go back to this exact moment and beat the living daylights out of yourself. It will be poetic and satisfying and—maybe it’s just your imagination, but a flicker of hurt flashes across Kanaya’s face as she sits down at the table across from Terezi and Vriska—very, very fucking deserved.

Terezi, still eyeing you over the rims of her glasses, tosses you one from the fruit bowl; by some miracle of force, you manage to catch it, and hope that you are the only person who can see how much your hands are shaking right now.

It’s because you’re cold, you tell yourself. It’s not a lie—you are, irritatingly so—but the better part of you knows that the way Kanaya is staring at the tabletop in front of her, like she’s trying to burn a hole through it with her eyes, has a little more to do with the involuntary gesture than you‘d like.

There are a billion different things you could say to her right now, yes, but you have the sneaking suspicion they’d all end the same way: three words, eight letters, a notion you still don’t know how to entertain without wanting to throw up.

“Right,” you say aloud, and you have to give yourself some credit here, really; your voice only shakes a tiny bit. “As you all were, then.”

You do not look back as you exit, and you tell yourself that the familiarly piercing gaze on the back of your neck is all in your head, too.

.:.

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] —

TG: yo

TG: lalonde

TG: earth to lalonde

TG: wait okay thats probably in poor taste now that earth literally doesnt exist anymore whoops

TG: stupid shitty space rock to lalonde

TG: come in commander

TG: houston is having problems 

TG: and by houston i mean me obviously

TG: actually im fine

TG: you can stop panicking now sheesh

TG: karkat is just trying to make me watch troll brokeback mountain for like the million billionth time since we started this stupid trip

TG: you know what come to think of it im actually very fuckin glad earth doesnt exist anymore because if karkat was aware there was even the slightest chance that he could get with human jake gyllenhaal our relationship would literally be nonexistent right now

TG: like i get outsold on the daily by that man its so fuckin depressing

TG: okay okay you got me

TG: i actually kind of like watching stupid troll brokeback mountain with karkat but if you tell him that i will literally put you in a fucking doomed timeline do you hear

TG: the dude already thinks he invented good taste in movies if i let him know im actually enjoying this shit he wont shut up about it until were all dead

TG: and saying as you and i got that sweet sweet conditional immortality like wed be talking full on aeons before he pipes the fuck down

TG: this is also totally not why i messaged you at all

TG: you got me all distracted and shit fuck you

TG: what i meant to say

TG: and im probably only gonna say this once in my life so savor this shit good and hard lalonde you hear

TG: youre about to witness history being made

TG: this is the shit theyll be talking about in textbooks in a hundred years right here just you fuckin watch

TG: okay here it goes

TG: three two one im kinda fuckin worried about you 

TG: boom

TG: dope as fuck to live through such a monumental event like that huh

TG: youre welcome for that experience

TG: but no real talk i am actually kind of really worried about you right now

TG: kanaya says its like fine or whatever and normally i would believe that because she knows you better than karkat knows the plot of fucking troll brokeback mountain but she is also not doing too hot right now

TG: like shes puttin fuckin antarctica to shame with how not hot shes doing

TG: so i dont know

TG: and i dont know if you guys fell out or some shit or if its totally unrelated to her and youre just going through it hardcore like you do i dont wanna go putting my nose where you dont want me to but like

TG: i kinda miss seeing you around and i know everyone else does too even if youre undeniably the biggest lame ass across all known universes

TG: and even though its only been like a week since you started being like this

TG: so yeah

TG: just

TG: i dont know

TG: come back soon I guess

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] ceased pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] \--

.:.

_Recently, I have made several key discoveries about the nuances of my personage_.

You’re trying to write in your journal again. Because why not.

_I think it’s a fair thing to say that these discoveries have not originated from this air, so to speak. Apparently I have quite the talent for ignoring what is right in front of me, and have been making good use of said skill for the past_

You pause, tapping your pen against your chin. How long have you been like this, really? Since you were a child, before you even knew the proper terminology, before you even knew of the existence of other options? Since you started making friends? Since you met Jade Harley? Or is it a later development, spurned into action by the game, by the catastrophes inflicted upon you and your friends during your session, by your arrival on this meteor?

Since you met Kanaya? 

You table that line of thinking with a faint grimace, bookmarking it for later. There’s a time to figure out the exact time of origin this development has, but now is not then.

_Well, the exact date remains a little unclear at the moment. As with these things, though, it would not be an unfair assumption to make that these thoughts and feelings have been percolating under the surface for quite some time, so to speak, and I have simply chosen to remain blind to them._

You half debate cracking a joke about your Sburb class here, but decide against it. The material feels a little tired at this point.

_I can imagine this unwillingness to acknowledge these untenable facts about myself stemmed from a myriad of places, but I think the general sentiments the human populace held towards these sorts of matters is a key locus in particular. Though I would never describe myself as susceptible to others' rhetoric—_

Okay, maybe that’s not entirely true, but whatever.

_—it seems that I did inadvertently swallow some that I grew up around hook, line, and sinker. If not directed at other individuals, then certainly directed at my own tendencies. Hence the rather vehement suppression. I’m sure if I were to talk to Dave on the matter, he would share similar experiences with me. My renewed research tells me this is not an uncommon experience for individuals of our nature._

You, of course, have not spoken to Dave on the matter. You have not spoken to Dave on any matter, really; the last stream of messages you received from him—a rather endearing tangent about him missing your presence around the meteor that made you much more emotional than felt strictly appropriate—sit opened but unanswered in your inbox.

You’re going to answer soon, of course. And you’re going to talk to him about—all this, too. You know you have to, at some juncture. It will feel good. He will respond positively and it will be a weight off your chest that you’ve been living under for the past year, at least. It will be good for you. You know this.

Just—not right now. In a bit. You just need some more time to get your head around everything.

You also can’t write it.

That’s the one pressing issue your renewed effects at journaling has picked up on: the fact that you are able to do anything, say anything about the topic but give a direct confession on your part.

Which is fine. You have two years left on this meteor to get there, and then an untold amount of time in your new universe, provided you all don’t die at the new session. There’s no rush, really.

It’s just, well, if you can’t even _write_ the admission in a journal no one is going to see but you, how on earth are you going to be able to say it out loud, much less to people whose reactions you care about entirely too much?

Exactly. It would be a travesty of untold proportions, and you’re really not looking to make things any worse for yourself right now.

So you hold off on responding to Dave. You hold off on responding to everyone, really. _In a bit_ , you remind yourself whenever you start to feel guilty about your absence; you just need a little more time. 

.:.

You’re returning to your room from another sojourn to the kitchen—this time it was empty, and you’re not entirely sure how you feel about this—when you run into Vriska.

Run into might be a bit of a generous descriptor, really; she’s propped up against the wall as you turn down the hallway into where the bedrooms are situated, and the toothy smile she gives you is pointed enough for you to feel like this meeting was not at all accidental.

This is, of course, exactly what you’ve been just dying to deal with right now. Fantastic.

“Lalonde,” she says, kicking herself off the wall to stand in front of you, effectively blocking your passage to your room. She will not stop grinning at you, and it’s a little unnerving.

You still opt for a grimace-like smile of your own in return, though. Manners maketh man, and all that. “Vriska.”

“Fancy seeing you out and about.”

You just arch an eyebrow and fold your arms.

“No, seriously.” She takes a step closer to you, head tipping to one side. “From the way Dave talks about it, you’d figure you had, like, gone and fucked yourself off into deep space, or something.”

You snort a little at that. “You are well aware, I’m sure, of my brother’s proclivity to lean into overdramatics when the occasion suits, I’m assuming?”

“Sure.” Vriska blinks once, long and slow. “He’s not wrong, though. You’ve been more than a little MIA recently.”

“I’m touched you noticed.”

Her grin widens a fraction. “Why’s that?”

You get the distinct impression that she already knows the answer to that question, somehow, and unease stirs in the pit of your stomach. “I’ve been busy.”

“With what?”

“Reopening my lines of communication with the Horrorterrors explicitly so I can send them to haunt your dreams in all their multi-tentacled glory.” You give Vriska the blandest look you can manage. “I’m busy with _stuff_ , Vriska. Personal matters. None which, shockingly enough, concern you.” 

“Oh, really?” And the look she gives you is just terrifying. “I talked to Kanaya.”

“Good for you,” you tell her, devoting every atom of concentration into sounding as normal as possible, even though the walls do sort of feel like they’re starting to close in on you just a little. “Do you plan on accosting me in the hallways every time you have a conversation with her, or can I assume such a course of action will take place following interactions you have with all of other friends on this meteor, too?”

“She told me what happened.”

Your next breath stops somewhere in the back of your throat. “I’m sorry?”

“She told me what happened,” Vriska repeats, her incisors glinting. “With you two.”

You try and make a move around Vriska to get to your room; she sidesteps easily, blocking your path. “Nothing happened between us.”

“Uh huh. Not what I heard.”

“You should get your ears tested, then.” She cuts off your next maneuver, too, and you give a small hiss of frustration. “Can you let me past, please?”

“C’mon, don’t be so boring, Lalonde. I wanna hear the deets.”

“There are no _deets_. Stop being ridiculous.“ You swallow, hard. “Let me past.”

“Of course there's deets. A brain-dead wiggler can tell there’s deets.” She gives you a look that’s almost plaintive, and you feel the center of your palm itch with the desire to slap it off her. “ _C’mon_ ,” she says again, stretching out the _o_ , whining. “I mean, it’s not like you’re gonna find someone better to bitch to about this. I‘m the motherfucking _expert_ on rejecting Kanaya Maryam at this point.”

Your blood goes cold.

In front of you, Vriska’s smile sharpens even further. “I mean, that is what happened, right?”

It takes you a second to find your voice amidst the pit of anger that's starting to open at the bottom of your stomach, inexplicably, but when you do, it’s so hard-edged it surprises even you. “It’s complicated,” you snap. “Get out of my way.”

“It really didn’t sound like it was. She made a pass on you, you told her no. Seems pretty straightforward to me, if I’m being real.”

“I’m not talking to you about this.“

“Why so cagey? It wasn’t a fucking secret, you know, her being ass over nubs for you the way she was, or anything—”

“Vriska, move. _Now._ ”

“—like, _goddamn_ , she made it clear as day how she felt about you. I’m surprised it—”

“ _Vriska_.”

“—took you so long to turn her down.” Her teeth flash again. “Heard it was _brutal_ , by the way.”

Logically, you know this is perhaps a convoluted manifestation of Vriska’s concern for her ex-morail, or her concern for you, or maybe a combination of the both. Logically, you have spent enough time around the troll to know that people skills are not exactly her strong suit; the past year has granted you with the opportunity to watch her butt heads with virtually everyone on the meteor because she doesn’t quite know how to say the right thing at the right time. Logically, you know she is not trying to be a bitch—well, not trying to be as much of a bitch as she’s being, maybe—and even if she is, it is still absolutely imperative that you do not rise to her bait; that is what she’s looking for here, after all: a reaction. Logically, you know you shouldn’t give it to her, not even in the slightest.

And yet your brain can’t help but trip up over parts of her speech— _it wasn’t a fucking secret echoes_ around your head like a gunshot fired right next to your ear—and the implications behind it: that you were an idiot, that you hurt Kanaya, that you fucked things up, so totally and irreparably.

And yet Vriska just stands there, grinning ear to ear, and suddenly you are so angry you can’t even breathe.

It’s not fully directed at her, not really—if you’re being honest, you yourself are probably more of the primary target for this unbridled rage—but _goddamn_ , if it doesn’t feel good, your knuckles connecting with the side of Vriska’s face with a sickening _thwack_.

You’re not sure if it’s the force or the unexpectedness of the punch that catches Vriska off guard; either way, she goes flying, staggering back into the wall behind her with a _thud_ that echoes around the hallway. She slides down onto the floor in a heap, bringing her hand up to her face. It comes away cerulean, and your knuckles throb as she looks at you, eyes screwed up, and spits, “What the _fuck_ , Lalonde?”

A door opens behind you; Terezi’s voice, fuzzy with sleep, calls out: “fuck’s goin' on?” and then, in a much clearer tone, “oh, _shit_.” There’s some ambiguous clatter down the hall for a moment before Karkat and Dave—the latter surprisingly sunglasses-less—come rushing out into the open, faces arranged into twin expressions of concern. Karkat takes one look at the scene—Vriska on the floor, blood on her mouth, and you standing above her, clenching and unclenching your hand at your side—and his mouth falls open in an almost-comical expression of shock.

Beside him, the look Dave gives you is just sad.

“What the fuck are you _doing?”_ Karkat says, but you’re barely able to hear him over the roaring in your ears. You take one last look at Vriska—now scowling up at the ceiling as she tries to stem the blood flow from her mouth with the hem of her shirt—flex your hand again, and do the only thing you can really do in this situation: you abscond.

.:.

In the end, it’s Dave that comes and finds you.

You’ve managed to hole yourself away in one of the libraries, curled up on the corner of the couch staring out the huge bay windows at the space surrounding you, knees hugged to your chest. There has been some brief mental debate about perhaps returning to your room, but you decided that would be the first place anyone would look to find you, and though you’re not entirely objected to talking to some of the members of the meteor party, you could really do without round two with Vriska right now.

So you’re in one of the libraries, fully expecting to remain here undisturbed for upwards of the next two days, when he comes in.

“Thank fuckin' god you’re here,” he says, drawl a little more pronounced than usual; you make a mental note to analyze his vocal patterns in connection with his various moods at a later time, and throw him a half-smile over your shoulder as he walks up to you. “I swear to god, I’ve spent the past hour looking through every goddamn library on this stupid space rock for you. If I set eyes on a bookshelf ever again, I’m going to flip my fuckin' lid.”

Dave comes up to the back of the couch and drops something in your lap. It’s an ice pack.

You look up at him. “I shouldn’t have punched her.”

He shrugs, then goes to sit down next to you, bumping your knees together. He’s still not wearing his sunglasses, and it serves as a reminder for just how expressive his eyes are; they widen a little, brows drawing together, as he looks down at your decidedly-swollen hand, before he just shrugs, fixing his gaze on the window. “Probably. I left Karkat having an absolute shit fit about the team dynamic going down the load gaper, or whatever he said, so you’ll probably have to handle that.”

“That’s reassuring.”

He blinks. “He’s not pissed at you, though. I mean, he is, but he gets pissed at people for, like, breathing funny within a fifty foot radius of him, so you kinda just gotta learn not to take it too personally. If I’m being real, I think he’s pretty convinced she deserved it, anyways.”

“Did she say what happened?”

Dave shakes his head. “Nah. Told everyone who was there not to ask. Vriska’ll probably tell TZ anyways, just ‘cause they’re dating, or whatever, but TZ’s cool; she’ll keep her trap shut about it.”

You frown. “Why do that?”

He looks over at you, lips quirking. “‘Cause it isn’t their business. I mean, it’s not really mine, either, but I sorta assumed you’d rather have me come check on you than, like, the gal you just decked in the mouth or Shouty McShoutface.”

You allow yourself a dry smile at that. “It’d be a test for their interpersonal skills, if nothing else.” Then, because you reason that it’s a perfectly fair, normal thing to ask; she was the only one you didn’t see in the hallway before you turned tail and left: “Did Kanaya see what happened?”

The look Dave gives you tells you that you’re not being nearly as transparent as you think; abashed, you almost wish he was still wearing his shades for a minute. “Nah, not in real time, I don’t think. She poked her head out to see what was going on a few seconds after you dipped but didn’t hang around. I think managed to put two and two together as to what happened, though, if that’s what you’re asking.”

It is. You sort of hate that he’s able to tell. “Huh. Alright, then.”

Dave bumps his knee against yours again, his gaze back to studying the sky. You watch the glow from outside reflect back in his eyes for a moment before he heaves a small sigh and turns to you again.

“Alright, look,” he says, and there's something in his voice that makes you instantly realize you are not going to like the new direction of this conversation. “I know I kinda just said I didn’t come here to, like, extract any gory details from you, or whatever, and I seriously meant that, ‘cause girl drama kinda makes my head hurt anyways—”

You snort. 

“—and I know you take being generally batshit insane pretty seriously and I don’t wanna, like, damage the sanctity of that title for you, or whatever, but even I gotta say that this is crossing into the wild and uncharted territory of a little out of character for you, Rose.” He shrugs again. “Just an observation.”

“Is that your glaringly subtle way of asking if I want to talk about it?”

“More of my glaringly subtle way of trying to tell you that I know something’s been up with you for a hot second.” He rubs the back of his neck. “And my even more glaringly subtle way of telling you that it probably isn’t going to go away just ‘cause you want it to. Even if you really, really want it to.”

“Speaking from personal experience, are we?”

The look Dave fixes you with goes straight through you, painfully so. “I dunno. Am I?”

You stare at your hands in your lap for a very long time, the ice pack pressed up against the back of one of them, your arm starting to go numb from the sensation. You don’t really believe in fate, nor do you really believe in particular exchanges having some sort of cosmic weight to them, because that's just stupid. But—and perhaps this is the Seer in you, or just the product of a series of catastrophic fuck-ups over the course of your time in this game—you do believe that all situations have a right way through them, a correct path to follow, and it’s never been hard for you to see the consequences of not taking this route. And you realize you are in one of those crucial moments right now. There are two options here: you can shut Dave out, and he will probably let you do so without little complaint. At the very least, there’s no way he can make you say anything you don’t want to short of the physical coercion you know he’d never stoop to.

Or you can talk to him. You can tell him. The vocabulary does not elude you anymore; there is a word for what you are, and you know the ins and outs of it impressively well by now. Nor would Dave’s reaction be adverse, not unless he plans on revealing himself to be this universe’s biggest hypocrite to date, which you know he isn’t.

He would understand. Out of anyone you know, he would understand the most.

Which is why it makes no sense to be as afraid as you are right now. Absolutely none, and it’s so infuriating that you can’t speak for a second. You flex your hands in your lap, opening and closing them like the right words to say here are something tangible, something you can grab onto and absorb, force through your body and out of your mouth. 

They aren’t, of course, and you realize that, if you’re really going to do this, it’s going to have to be a somewhat tangential explanation. 

Whatever. Not like you’re any more pressed for time now, after all. And what better place is there to start than at the beginning?

“Jade was in love with you.”

Clearly your subconscious has a very different definition of where _the beginning_ is, then. You studiously ignore the arched-eyebrows expression Dave throws your way and continue to stare at your hands. Maybe if you just pretend he isn’t here, that you’re just in your room, talking to your walls, talking to no one, you’ll be able to do this right. 

Christ, you don’t even know what _right_ means anymore. 

“In love might be too strong a term, actually,” you amend. “I’m not sure if any of us were at the age where we could understand what that term meant past a very two-dimensional level, but I know she harbored amorous feelings for you for apparently quite some time. She told me about it a few weeks before John’s birthday.”

Beside you, Dave bobs his head. “Yeah, I know about that.”

There really is no reason your stomach should twist as hard as it does at that. “You do?”

“Sure. We talked about it a couple of times during the game. I mean, I’m pretty sure I liked her, but it was sort of hard for me to balance, like, the whole dealing with a cohort of obnoxious-ass aliens and a bunch of my alternate selves getting their heads cut off and the whole vague threat of imminent death and demise we had to deal with all the time as well as, you know, starting something up with her, even if she was a really kick-ass lady.” He smiles a little, and you find yourself thinking of pixelated screenshots and laying in the dirt staring up at the trees. “I think if things had been different, and we hadn’t started playing, maybe it woulda worked, too. But I don’t really regret where I’m at right now, either, and I don’t think she’d want me to, so, I don’t really have any complaints.”

You nod. Then, before you can think about it too much, “I stopped talking to her once she told me.”

Dave’s eyebrows creep up towards his hairline. “Yeah?”

“Not entirely, I suppose, but our communications got few and far between from that point onward. I reasoned it with the fact that we were both extraordinarily busy upon entering the Medium, which wasn’t a lie, strictly speaking, but it’s also entirely fair to say that I could’ve come into contact with her a lot more than I did should I have wanted to.” You clench your hands again. “The last time we spoke directly was when she told me my mother had just been killed.”

Dave bumps your shoulders together, and you lean into the touch. 

“I used to tell myself that I had no idea why I didn’t want to talk to Jade anymore,” you say, softly. “Or I used to pretend that there was simply no reason, and we were just busy. But in reality, her confession in regards to her crush on you hurt me in a number of ways I couldn’t fully explain, and every time I would be confronted with those feelings, I would just feel so goddamn _guilty_ about everything. And talking to her made all of that hit so much harder than I knew how to deal with, so I just stopped. I told myself it could be as easy as that, and I just did.”

Dave hums a little. His shoulder is warm against yours. 

“Vriska was trying to talk to me about Kanaya.”

There is still time to back out. There is still time to play off your semi-confession regarding Jade as a misinterpretation on Dave’s part and never have this conversation with him, with anyone. You have been living under a certain mantle for your entire life; who’s to say you can’t keep doing it, at least for another two years?

There is still time, and yet you keep talking.

“She was enquiring about a conversation that transpired between the two of us several days ago. I had been—not having a good day and Kanaya had come in to check on me. I got a little emotional and she held my hand through that, so to speak, and when I woke up I just—” You swallow, hard. “I just couldn’t. I didn’t know how to handle what I was—what I thought about her, and her own actions made things so much harder to deal with, so I just—told her to get out. I told her that we were just friends and that whatever tangential course our relationship was starting to embark upon was impossible for me to participate in and I told her to leave. Christ.” A laugh slips out of your mouth, a little jagged around the edges. “I didn’t even fucking _want_ her to go, but it felt like if I spent another ten seconds around her I was going to do or say something irreparable, and I just—I couldn’t. I couldn’t deal with that.”

You swallow again. Your throat is feeling frustratingly tight, and it takes a lot for your next sentence to come out sounding normal. 

“We haven’t spoken since then. Something of a recurring trend for me, then.”

Dave hums again. You feel his gaze on you for a second before he looks back out at the stars. “Jade never said anything bad about you to me.”

You blink. Hard. “Really?”

“Yeah. I mean, being real, you weren’t exactly the hot topic of a lot of our chats, but when you came up, she never had anything but good shit to say about you. I think she kinda noticed when you stopped talking to her a bit, but she was never like, oh, fuck Rose, she sucks so much for being like this, you know? At worst, she was just worried that she’d fucked something up with you.”

“It wasn’t—” You shake your head, breathing hard. “It wasn’t her. She didn’t do anything. It was me.”

“I don’t think that’s super fair. Like totally, she didn’t do anything wrong, no criticisms with that claim, but you—this shit is _hard_ , Rose. Fuck, this shit is so fuckin' hard to deal with. It’d be hard if we were all still back on Earth living our lives and being sorta normal teenagers doing sorta normal teenager shit, but we’re traveling at light speed through deep space with four aliens on a one-way trip to meet the paradoxical teenage versions of our actual parents. Like—” He laughs, short and sharp. “—every word of that sentence is literally _insane_. And it sucks, because you feel like with all that shit, your own personal issues, or whatever, shouldn’t be the things that you’re focusing on, right? Like, man, we watched the fuckin' _world_ end; you can't help but think how dumb would it be to turn around from that and then have, like, panic attacks over the fact that you wanna kiss certain people maybe more than you’ve been taught you should. I saw my motherfucking bro die—man, I saw _myself_ die, like, three times. I went on a suicide mission with my fuckin' sister and fully expected the both of us to get our asses blown out of this timeline and we came back as fuckin' _gods._ Like, deadass gods with _powers_ , and shit.” Dave's mouth twitches into what sort of looks like a smile. “I lived through all that shit, and for the first two months of being on this meteor, the only nightmares I had were ones where I tried to kiss Karkat and he rocked my _shit_ ‘cause of it.”

He looks at you— _through_ you, really, and you ball your hands into fists. "Just ‘cause we’re in this batshit-ass situation doesn’t mean we’re not going to be normal teenagers and have normal teenager problems, Rose,” he says. “The only thing you’re gonna achieve by telling yourself you should be above that kinda shit is feeling stupid about everything. And you’re not.” He reaches out, grabbing you by the shoulders to turn you to face him. “You hear me? It’s not stupid to be upset about this kind of stuff. It’s not stupid to not know what to do or how to handle it.”

“But it _is_.” Your voice cracks, painfully, your breaths coming unsteady. _Fuck_. “Because when I stop and just— _listen_ to myself for five minutes, I sound ridiculous. I sound so uneducated and antiquated and I know—god, I fucking _know_ that there is nothing wrong with this. I would never say that about—about _you_ , or about any of the trolls, or about anyone else. I would never.”

Dave's grip on your shoulders tightest in time with the back of your throat. Your voice is getting shakier and shakier.

“But when it’s about me, I just—I couldn’t stop thinking that it was _wrong_ , or weird, or reprehensible in some way to be feeling like that and I—I fucking let it _destroy_ my relationship with Jade and now with Kanaya and I feel like it’s going to keep ruining everything for me because I don’t know how to deal with it or how to let myself be like this without—fuck, without feeling there’s something _wrong_ with me because of it and I am just so fucking _sick_ of hating myself because of this, Dave.”

You realize, sort of dully, that you’re crying. The thing in your chest has come apart completely; the pieces lay on the floor before you, and you are too fucking exhausted and _sad_ to do anything but stare at them, in tears.

“I don’t want to hate myself,” you whisper to him, shuddering, half-gasping around the yawning ache in your chest, like someone’s cleaved you in two. “I’m so tired of hating myself.”

Dave gives you a look that’s no pity and all pain, and somehow it’s the final straw. You’re folding up on yourself before you really know it’s happening; the noises coming out of your mouth sound almost animalistic in how agonized they are, like someone’s stabbing you in the gut over and over and over again, and maybe the funniest thing about this that you have been stabbed in the gut before, and it didn’t hurt anywhere near as badly as this.

You’re still trying to speak as Dave pulls you in for a hug— _I’m sorry_ and _I’m so tired of this_ coming together into one, incomprehensible stream of words and noise—your chin bumping against his shoulder, his arms coming around to your back. You can feel him shaking, just a little, and somehow that only makes you cry harder.

You are so tired. You are so, so fucking tired.

“You’re okay,” he whispers in your ear, cheek pressed against your forehead. “You got it. Just—let it all out.”

And you do. You cry because you are tired and because your hand is still throbbing. You cry because you miss Jade. You cry because you miss Kanaya, and you cry because you’re never going to be able to tell her that now because all you do is mess everything you come into contact with up beyond repair. You cry because Dave understands this—you know he does—and the fact that he felt this sort of pain before and you did nothing to help him makes you feel so shitty and so horrible you can’t breathe. You cry because you feel wrong, and you cry because you don’t want to anymore.

You cry because you love Kanaya so, so much you don’t know what to do with yourself, and you are so sick of that being the scariest thing in the world to you. You are so fucking sick of it.

“I—” You swallow back a sob, your face pressed the shoulder of his now-soaked shirt. “I—I love her. Fuck, I love her, Dave, I love her so—fucking much.”

“That’s okay,” he says, squeezing you hard. “That’s _okay_.”

And the dam just keeps on breaking. You cling to Dave, fists balling the fabric of his shirt, face buried into the crook of his neck now, and just sob. Until you can’t speak. Until you can barely breathe, and he just sits there, holding you.

“There is nothing wrong with you,” he says. You can feel his voice reverberating around your body, almost louder than the thud of your heartbeat in your ears, than your raspy, shuddering breathing. “You hear me? There is nothing fucking wrong with you, Rosie. You aren’t wrong. You aren’t wrong for loving her, or for loving Jade, or for loving girls in general, okay? That’s okay. It’s fucking okay to be like that. You’re still special and important and _good_ because of it, yeah? You’re not wrong—fuck, you’re the furthest thing from that.”

“I’m so sorry,” you whisper. You’re not even sure what you’re apologizing for.

He shakes his head. “No, no, _fuck_ no. You don’t have anything to be sorry for, okay? You’re doing so good. This shit is so hard, Rosie; I get it, believe me, I fucking get it. It’s fucking hard and scary and exhausting and you’re kicking ass right now with it as I’m really proud of you, okay?“ He pulls you back a little to look you in the eyes. His own are shining. “I’m so goddamn proud of you, Rosie.”

It’s your turn to shake your head. “I fucked up,” you say, shaking. “I’ve fucked everything up.”

Dave reaches up to smooth some of your hair back, blinking hard. “It’s gonna be okay, yeah? Everything’s gonna be okay, just—just—you’re okay, Rosie. There is nothing wrong with you. I swear to god, there is nothing wrong with you.”

And it’s all just too much; you feel hollowed out and miserable, more tired than you ever have in your life. You feel sick and scared and dizzy and so out of control that you just collapse forward into him again, into Dave, into the only person in the world right now who knows your secret, your stupid, stupid little secret, and you just keep _crying_.

You don’t stop for a very long time.

.:.

You’ve made it to the couch in Dave’s room, still curled up against him, the two of you sitting in half-peaceful, half-exhausted silence, when you realize you never even said it to him.

And it’s not like it matters—god knows if he didn’t cotton on to the impetus behind your moment back there during the course of it, you have no idea what you’re going to do—Dave knows. There’s no metric value to voicing it out loud.

But the emotional value, though.

You swallow back another knot in your throat. Goddamnit.

“Dave?” After what could have easily been hours of crying, you’re shocked you even have a voice left at all; what remains is hoarse and brittle around the edges. It would make you cringe if you had even an ounce of energy in your body to care for something like that right now, which you really, really do not.

He hums against your hair, “‘Sup?”

There’s still a chance to back out. There’s still a chance to ignore this; you know this is true; it would be so easy to just not—

“I‘m gay.”

He’s quiet for a very long time. Finally, he sniffs a little and exhales. “That’s cool,” he says softly. “That’s dope as fuck. Thanks for telling me.”

“Thank you for listening.”

He presses his face into the top of your head and squeezes your shoulders.

You close your eyes.

.:.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> final chapter what will i do

You’re awoken from a nap by the sound of pounding on your door.

Still half-asleep, you throw yourself out of bed, grumbling. There’s an odd moment right before you open it where you think—hope, really—that it’ll be Kanaya on the other side, before remembering that Kanaya does not knock on doors like she is trying to beat them half to death, and the two of you have yet to have a conversation of any relative substance.

It’s been at the top of your list of things to work on, but you still find yourself unable to get to it, inexplicably enough. 

Karkat’s scowling face greets you on the other side, and you do a very good job of not looking disappointed by this.

“Movie night,” he snaps before you even get the chance to open your mouth and greet him.

You arch an eyebrow. “Come again?”

“We’re having a movie night, Lalonde. Attendance is mandatory. If you even think about saying no, I’m going to kick your ass so hard your spleen is going to rupture.”

“Thoughtful.” You give him a small smile. “I’ll be there in ten.”

By the time you arrive, everyone else is already there, perched on the assortment of couches and chairs that serve as the common room space. Karkat has his head inside the television box, a muffled stream of obscenities emanating from him as Dave hovers at his side, grinning around handfuls of popcorn. Vriska is seated on one of the couches with her feet in Terezi’s lap; she gives you a toothy grin as you enter, the scab on her lip glinting in the light a little, and it takes you a while to realize that there is no discernible malice behind the gesture. You give her a small smile back, feeling oddly as if you have just dodged a bullet you hadn’t even noticed being fired, and look for a seat.

Which is to say, you locate where Kanaya is sitting—at the end of the main couch, sketchbook balanced on her knees, tongue poking out between her lips in a way it always does when she’s concentrating—and head over to her. You shoot for appearing casual and calm; you probably come off more as decidedly unhinged, but either way, your arrival gets Kanaya to look up at you, which is all you’re really interested in anyways.

“Mind if I sit here?” you ask. It’s painfully inadequate, especially considering the fact that these are the first words you’ve spoken to her in a week, but you’re not looking to make yourself cry anymore in the near future, so it’ll have to do.

It takes a very long time for her to look up at you, and you’re just starting to think that the wait is going to kill you right here and now when she finally sets her pencil down and looks up into your eyes. The gold flecks gleam, practically spiraling around her pupils, the green glowing ever so slightly, and you forget what words are for a second.

Her face is carefully blank, giving nothing away. “It’s fine with me.”

And, okay, she sounds a little clipped—irritated, even—but you can work with this. You’re going to work with this.

The movie starts, and even though it’s some god-awful troll romance film that only Karkat enjoys—and you’re starting to have suspicious that even he doesn’t like them nearly as much as he says he does—you do your best to pay attention, if only so you can keep up a stream of running commentary. Every time you crack a joke, you side-eye Kanaya to gauge her reaction; to your surprise mingled with unbridled delight, she laughs at almost all of them, even giving you a few appreciative smiles at the particularly funny ones. The gestures never last long, but you ride on the highs they give you anyways. Eventually, the combination of the positive reactions she’s given you so far and the onset of a particularly explicit and somehow still painfully awkward scene in the movie gives you the courage to lean over to her.

“I could’ve sworn I walked in on Terezi and Vriska doing something like this just last week,” you whisper in her ear.

She blinks once, then full-on snorts, pressing a fist to her mouth and grinning. Her fangs slip over her bottom lip in a way that has yet to be any less stupidly endearing to you that the first time you saw it and gives you an eye roll that isn’t angry in the least. You are so, so happy you do not pay a single modicum of attention to the proceedings of the movie for five minutes straight. When you finally tune back in, you’re in the middle of a scene in which a troll somehow manages to get a concussion in order to make himself a more viable redrom candidate for his love interest; you have no idea how this logic follows, but, again, you can’t resist leaning over to Kanaya to comment on it all the same.

“Now this I distinctly remember transpiring between Dave and Karkat a few months ago.”

And, to your delight, she leans right back to you. “They must be drawing inspiration from these films,” she murmurs. Her breath is very warm on the side of your face.

“Suddenly I understand so much.”

“Truly. When you think about it, their dynamic really does simply boil down to—”

“Will you two shut the fuck up?” Karkat snaps from across the room, absolutely no malice to his voice. In fact, if you were feeling particularly ambitious, you might even say he was grinning a little. “Some of us are trying to appreciate art over here.”

Kanaya arches her eyebrows in concession, but you still hear her whisper “art seems an overly-generous term, don’t you think?” at you, and you don’t stop smiling for a very long time.

Over the course of the movie, you keep up this back-and-forth of snarky comments. Soon enough, you find your face is starting to hurt from smiling, and Kanaya has excused herself under the pretense of getting water twice to go laugh silently in the kitchen. Each time she returns, the two of you end up sitting a little closer than before; as the final half hour of the movie starts up, you are sitting right next to her, just a few inches between you.

You place your hand down on the space between you two and, really, you’re not even thinking about it that much. The movie is passably entertaining, if only because the plot is so bizarre and convoluted and every time you look over at Karkat, he’s staring at the screen with more rapture in his eyes than you think should be physically possible, so you do your best to concentrate on the remaining minutes.

Then Kanaya puts her hand down next to yours, and suddenly the only thing you’re able to think about is atoms.

You focus so, so hard on staying entirely still at her gesture, but a small part of you still can’t help it: you flinch like she’s just tased you, and she jerks her hand back instantly, expression closing off like a door slamming shut. She folds her hands in her lap, lips twisting into a flat, grim line, and your head spins with the weight of the frustration that hits you.

This is fine. You’re allowed to want to hold her hand, goddamnit. You’re allowed to want it.

_But—_

Before you can think about it, you reach across the space separating you and grab her wrist, pulling it back towards you. She’s side-eyeing you like you’ve grown a second head and you sort of feel like you’re going to throw up. You tamp down on that as hard as you possibly can and focus very hard on the feeling of Kanaya’s pulse under your finger. After a second of you just sitting there, half-gripping her wrist, you remember there’s a few more steps to this plan you have yet to complete; breathing around the strange pressure opening up on the center of your chest, you relinquish her wrist and slowly, carefully lacing your fingers together.

You breathe. You squeeze her hand. 

This isn’t fair on her, not really. You cannot tell her you only want to be her friend and then do things like this in the conversation directly succeeding that; it’s dangerously close to leading her on, and she deserves so, so much better than that. From anyone. From you.

But after a few seconds, she squeezes your hand back, almost painfully so. Almost, except it isn’t because her hand is warm and soft and for the first time in what might be forever the urge to run away from all this is smaller, much smaller, than the one telling you to stay here and hold her forever.

As it is, forever lasts about another twenty minutes in which you devote absolutely none of your attention to the movie and instead split it between the feeling of her fingers gripping yours—you’re reminded vaguely of an earlier observation about how it seemed as if your hands had been made for one another, and it makes you substantially less miserable to think about this time around—and the way she is looking at the television like she wants it to explode.

You’re not sure what that expression means. For all your understanding of the ins and outs of Kanaya Maryam, you are decidedly in uncharted territory right now; you are learning this game as you play, so to speak. It’s a little exciting and a little heart-stoppingly terrifying; you try and focus on the former sentiment as much as you can.

And you do. For the first time, you actually do. 

When the movie ends, Kanaya shakes your grip off and hurries away before Karkat’s even paused the credits. You watch her back as it retreats, side-stepping Dave and turning around the corner in a flash of red and black. It’s only as Vriska comes to hover in front of you, smirking, that you realize you’ve been staring at the door she left from looking undoubtedly more than a little stupid. 

“What?” you snap up at her before remembering that she totally has a punch on you right now. “Sorry.”

Vriska either doesn’t notice or—more likely—doesn’t care. Her smirk widens. “Deets,” she says, almost sagely. “Told ya.”

Then she turns on her heel and marches out of the room, Terezi in tow. Leaving Karkat to suffer through trying to figure out how to eject the DVD, Dave saunters over to you, hands jammed into his pockets. He tips his head to the side a little as he looks down at you.

“That coulda gone worse,” he remarks.

“Could’ve gone better.”

“Considering that was the first time you guys interacted in, like, eighty years, or whatever, I’d say it isn’t exactly a loss.”

“No, it isn’t.” You frown, staring down at your still-open hand laying beside you.

Dave tips his head some more. “‘Sup?”

“Kanaya.” You bring your hand back to your lap, lacing your own fingers together now, and frown harder. “I need to talk to her. I really, really need to talk to her.” 

“Grab that motherfucking bull by the horns. Or troll, I guess. Except don’t grab Kanaya’s horns. I feel like that might cause problems.” He shakes his head a little before flashing you a small smile. “You get what I mean. Just do it.”

Like it’s as simple as that.

And honestly, the more you think about it, the more you think it might be.

.:.

\-- tentacleTherapist [TT] began pestering grimAuxiliatrix [GA] \--

TT: Hi.

GA: Hello

TT: What are you doing right now?

GA: Sewing 

GA: But Thats Moderately Disinteresting Im Not Fully Committed To The Task At Hand Ive Found

GA: So Now Im Just Sort Of Sitting Around I Guess

GA: Why

TT: Can I come over?

TT: I think we need to talk.

GA: Um

GA: Alright I Guess

TT: Thank you.

TT: Be there in five.

\-- tentacleTherapist [TT] ceased pestering grimAuxiliatrix [GA] \--

.:.

You spend three out of the aforementioned five minutes sitting on the floor of your bathroom, head in your hands, focusing very hard on the feeling of your breath against your palms. You spent the next ninety seconds trying to convince yourself to stand up with little success; it feels suddenly as if your limbs have been stapled to the floor, rendering you totally immobile. You spend the next thirty seconds after that trying to arrange your appearance into one of vague presentability and then speed-walking out of your room and down the hallway to where Kanaya’s is.

There’s a moment when, with your fist poised to start knocking, your breath trapped somewhere in the pit of your lungs, your internal organs feeling strangely liquified, where you wonder if this is the right course of action. Not the apologizing part—because that is, and you’re going to do that no matter how uncomfortable or awkward it might be—but the confession of your feelings. Your feelings for her, more specifically. There are a lot of ways it could go wrong, and one of the many things you’ve learnt this past week is how totally unappealing the rest of your journey looks if Kanaya is not by your side in some capacity, however platonic, for the duration of it. And, certainly if you were ever looking for a method to chase her away, send her running even more than you already have, telling her that you—

Well. 

No, not _well_. Goddamnit, if you’re actually going to do this thing, learning how to say the sentence at least in your head, is a step you’re very much going to need to learn how to take _now._

You like her. Telling her that you like her.

You exhale, pressing your forehead against her door and squeezing your eyes shut for a second. Yeah, that. That’s a good way to scare her off. Given the cultural differences between your species and hers that you’ve been tallying up in the back of your mind for the past year, it doesn’t feel entirely out of question to reason that you could’ve interpreted completely platonic gestures on her part as more amorous ones. And, god, if you have, you are about to be so, so fucked.

With a shake of your head, you brush that aside. Probably not the most helpful mentality to adopt. You have a feeling that regardless of the probability of things going south, you’re still going to tell her anyways, innumerable consequences be damned.

You manage to make sure your hand only shakes a little when you knock. It’s an impressive feat.

“Come in,” Kanaya’s voice says from the inside. Biting back a wave of panic that threatens to engulf you and send you running to go rot in the darkest corner of the meteor, you take a steeling breath, and push her door open.

She’s seated on the edge of her bed, hands gripped together so tightly her knuckles have gone white. She looks perhaps more nervous than you’ve ever seen her, and yet she still flashes you a small smile as you enter and shut the door behind you.

For a second, you entirely forget why you’re here. You just stand in the center of her room, hands flexing at your sides, staring at her in a manner that is probably very stupid looking. For a second, your mind is entirely blank.

Then, all of a sudden, every thing you’ve been meaning to say to her for the past seven days comes back to you in a rush, and in the shock of the impact, the only thing you’re able to get out when you open your mouth is, “How much do you know about the human concept of homosexuality?”

Perhaps this is another moment in which, when you finally convince Dave to make you that time loop, you can go back and throw your past self down a flight of stairs. Right now, it’s looking more and more like it’d be an epigrammatic use of your time.

In front of you, Kanaya’s eyes widen a fraction. “Um.” She frowns. “I mean, aside from the fact that it is a concept that exists, not much. Karkat has served as the main vessel for information regarding that for most of my life, and you can imagine the dubious levels of accuracy the things he says often have.”

You give her a quick smile. “Quite.”

“Why do you ask?”

“You say that as if you know the answer already.”

She just arches her eyebrows. You duck your head, studying a point midway up her shin for a moment before carrying on.

“In human culture, homosexuality is a—taboo subject, as it were. I can imagine that’s something of a bizarre notion to you coming from a species in which same-sex attraction on some level seems to be the default, and truthfully, you wouldn’t be wrong in your assumptions.” You think of the chatrooms for a moment and grimace a little. “Doubtless I could spend hours upon hours trying to work my way back to the specific origin of my species’ rather ardent dislike for those who experience same-sex attraction, but that would be both a tireless and pointless endeavor. My universe is destroyed, as is—so I hope, at least—all remnants of that sentiment.”

Kanaya just blinks.

You scuff at her rug with the toe of your shoe for a second, thinking very hard about what you want to say next. “I found that to be the origin of much of my frustration for a while.”

“Your species’ dim view of homosexuality?”

“No—well, yes, but more specifically the fact that said dim view had, for all intents and purposes, been exterminated along with the rest of my universe. Even before that happened, I was in a game that was wholly separated from the reality I had just come from, and yet I still found myself—clinging to those values nonetheless.”

Kanaya's eyebrows higher. She looks more than a little unnerved now. “You were homophobic?” 

It takes a lot out of you not to slap yourself on the forehead. “No, I just—god, this is more challenging to explain than I anticipated.”

Her mouth twists a little. “I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault.” You wave a hand. “It’s fine. I’m just—lacking the necessary vocabulary to explain this without sounding like a total asshole, I guess.”

“How about you just say it?” Kanaya sounds more gentle now, and you have to bite down hard on the inside of your cheek to relieve the pressure that starts to build up in the back of your throat. You’ve been talking for five minutes; you can stave off the tears for just a _little_ longer, you think. “I promise to reserve all judgements.”

“I’m still going to sound like an asshole, though.”

A small smile flits across her face. “I’m sure you won’t.” 

You nod. Then, “I’ll probably cry.”

“Is that supposed to discourage me from wanting to hear you?” Her smile doesn’t falter, even if her words go hard-edged, just a little. “If I’m being entirety selfish here, I would say I deserve at least some sort of explanation for what’s been going on between us beyond a simple _I don’t know what I’m doing anymore._ And at the very least, I would rather listen to you be an asshole for twenty minutes than have us never get back to speaking terms during the course the next two years.” 

“Um.” You clear your throat. “Um, same. Yes, that sounds—ill-advised. Quite.”

You suck in a breath through your teeth, steeling yourself. So long, proverbial bandage.

“I used to hate myself quite a lot.”

Kanaya frowns a little, and shifts back on her bed. It takes you a second to realize she’s patting the space next to her, offering you a place to sit down, and you feel simultaneously weak with relief and wound tight enough to snap. With some difficulty in getting all your limbs to move at the right time in the right direction—there’s a very strong urge picking up in the back of your head telling you to sprint back out through the door—you get yourself to perch yourself on the edge of her bed. She folds her legs underneath her, turning to face you.

“Go on,” she says.

“I suppose the past participle there might be indicative of—of the fact that these feelings have been entirely processed and packaged away as of right now. Though this week has been, um, _fortuitous_ in terms of self-discovery—and the version of self-acceptance that comes along with that, I suppose—we are by no means out the woods yet.”

Kanaya shrugs a little. “That seems fair.”

“Does it?”

“You lived your whole life thinking about certain matters in one way. To ask yourself to revert your perspective entirely in the timeframe of only a few days seems a little unrealistic, even for someone with such strength of will as you.”

“Thanks,” you say, dryly, and she arches an eyebrow again. 

“I was being serious there.”

“Oh.” You swallow, rub at your chin for a little, and study the piece of lint on the edge of your skirt for much longer than appropriate, probably, trying to wrestle your voice back under control. When you speak, it still comes out a little hoarse. “I never thought it was wrong.”

“Homosexuality?”

You nod. “There’s something of a phenomenon—if that’s the right word, really—among humans who experience same-sex attraction. The open acceptance for others who do, but the prevalent lack of that very same acceptance when it comes to their own inclinations. It’s, uh, challenging, I guess, to illustrate in a way that doesn’t sound entirely contradictory, but likely there’s some sort of translatable concept in your culture.” You chew on the inside of your cheek for a second. “When everyone around you tells you something is wrong—whether it be in the stale rhetoric of books written by long-dead psychotherapists or just under the surface of communication interfaces in the World Wide Web—it can be hard to, um, think otherwise, I guess? God knows I wouldn’t consider myself an impressionable person, but—well, you know.”

She hums a little, bobbing her head slowly. “I think I understand. On Alternia, society was divided up into a system of castes based on blood color. The higher up on the hemospectrum you were, the higher your caste was, and the overall easier life you would be expected to live.”

You nod in return. Karkat had attempted to explain this to you once or twice, but the rather confusing rampages had been a little challenging to follow at the best of times, You remember mentions of the caste system, though, and how angry he had looked when he had talked about it.

“So, for example, I myself am a jade blood, which puts me around the middle of the spectrum. Karkat has a very rare mutation to his blood, putting him at the lowest end of the spectrum, and some of my old friends in my session were royalbloods—violet and fuchsia—putting them at the opposite end.” You watch the way her hands clench, ever so slightly, at the mention of the unnamed friends, and make a mental note to ask her about them later. “Though the entire system was—well, bullshit, basically, some of said friends found themselves playing into it a little more. They had grown up being taught nothing else, after all, so there was never any real challenge for them to adopt the opinions of society they lived in, especially if said opinions were beneficial to them. Even though I think many of them knew it was wrong. Especially if they knew.” Her lips twist for a second, before she blinks, looking up at you. “Does—sorry, that was tangential, but the point is, I think I get it. It makes sense, at least.”

You make another mental reminder to ask Kanaya about Alternia more in general before pushing it aside. “Yeah, that—yeah. Seems comparable. Um, yeah, anyways, point is, it was just challenging growing up and trying to separate my own rhetoric from everyone else’s. I think I managed to do a good job in terms of formulating my opinions on others, but when it came to myself—”

You swallow, letting out a long, slow breath. This is fine. You can do this.

“When it came to myself, I struggled more. The own personal sentiments I had developed told me there was absolutely nothing wrong with other people liking individuals of the same gender, and I should do my best to support and respect anyone I knew who did, but the thinking I ended up applying more to myself specifically was—well, the opposite.”

Another swallow. Strangely enough, it’s doing nothing to abate the tension building up in your chest. Goddamnit.

“I told myself that it—well, that _I,_ really, was wrong. That there was something very wrong with me for thinking and feeling that way.”

“There isn’t,” Kanaya says, and she looks very, very sad all of a sudden.

You blink. “I mean, no, but I didn’t—I found it very hard to think that way. And the game came at such a convenient time for me in regards to all that, in the sense that it entirely facilitated my campaign of not thinking or dealing with my feelings in any way. I kept very busy.”

“Oh, I remember. Poor LOLAR.”

You huff a little at that. “Poor LOLAR indeed. And after all that there was, well, my mother’s death, and my lapse into grimdarkness, and then my own death, after which I had the Green Sun mission to handle, so, really, it’s only been in this past year which I’ve been afforded the opportunity to think about such matters. Somewhat begrudgingly, I might add.”

Kanaya nods. “Can I ask a question?”

“Please.” You scrub at your face for a second. “Please, go right ahead. I’m making virtually no sense here.”

“You’re doing fine.” Her hand twitches towards your knee for a second, and though it is ever-present, how much you want physical contact from her, the weight of it still catches you off guard when it slams into your like that. Christ. She notices your not-so-subtle staring, and smiles a little. “Well, rather in connection with that, is your somewhat, um, tenuous relationship with being on the receiving end of physical contact from me an—an extension of—um, all that?”

“Sort of.” You take another steeling breath. “Really, it was just an issue for me because I always liked it too much.”

“Oh.” Her cheeks go a little jade at that, and you add that image to the collection of the best things you’ve ever seen in your life. Unsurprisingly enough, the running list is rather Kanaya-centric at the moment. 

God, how did you go a _year_ without admitting this? 

“I think that was the issue in general, really.” 

She frowns. “What was?”

“That I liked you too much.” You lean forward, elbows on your knees, and press your fist to your lips. “There was another girl back before the game—Jade Harley, I’m sure you spoke to her—but with that it was always—I could always reason that I was just lonely, and she was the first girl I ever really became friends with, so of course my feelings might get a little—a little out of control, I guess. I figured that was to be expected. But with you—”

Still at your mouth, your hand starts to shake a little.

“But with you, I couldn’t—god, I just couldn’t ignore it. Not when you were there all the time, there in real life, and I was—and I just liked you so much. I liked you so much and it completely clashed with everything I had built up in my head regarding who I was and who I was attracted to and after a point I couldn’t ignore it anymore and then I just—I just couldn’t. And it was so much easier to drop off the face of the meteor and push you away instead of just _admitting_ that I was—that I liked—fuck, that I liked girls. That I liked you.”

You’d felt the unravelling feeling before, back in the library with Dave a while days ago, and though the sensation in your chest now is similar, certainly, it’s not entirely the same. You feel—light, somehow, almost dangerously so, like the only thing keeping you from floating out of the room is Kanaya’s gaze burning a hole through the side of your head. You feel like you sort of want to start laughing and sort of want to start crying and definitely like you need to look Kanaya in the eyes for this next bit.

So you do, with a conscious effort. It makes your stomach do absolutely indescribable things to see hers are shining.

“This isn’t even what I meant to say.” You’re going to start babbling now; you can feel it. “I meant to come here and apologize, actually, because that’s what you deserve. I—okay, regardless of any bullshit on my part, regardless of any of my own issues or feelings or—or _whatever_ , I put you in an unfair position time and time again and, Christ, I mean, you were an absolute _saint_ about it, but it still wasn’t fair. That’s what I meant when I said I didn’t want rope you into this anymore: I—it was so fucking _unfair_ of me to keep wanting and expecting totally contradictory things from you and then shutting you out every time I got one of those reactions like it wasn’t what I wanted. I should have been forthcoming about what was going on, or at least communicated my feelings even a _little_ bit better, but I didn’t, and I’m sorry. I’m really fucking sorry. And I—look, if you want, you can ignore everything in the conversation I said before this last bit because it’s honestly quite stupid and I don’t expect—I could never expect you to wait for me to sort my shit out, or anything, but I have to—I feel like it's worth it to mention the futility of talking about my feelings in the past tense as if they aren’t active things I’m experiencing right now, because they are, and—and again, I don’t expect or frankly _deserve_ anything from you in regards to this, but I want to be honest so I have to say—”

She kisses you.

She surges forward, quite suddenly, and you feel one of her hands on the back of your head, the other cupping the side your face, and your thoughts just have time to revert to a rather garbled stream of words that you think could be summed up as _what the fuck?_ before her lips are on yours and your entire body has exploded. 

And then it explodes again. And again, and again, and again; for every second her lips stay on yours, you explode in the best way possible. Your limbs go light and heavy at the same time and it feels like someone’s set of a sparkler in your stomach and your head is spinning and the places where she is touching you—your cheek, the back of your neck, your shoulder, your hip—are on fire. She is kissing you and at some point you remember you should kiss her back and you do, grabbing her waist, bunching your hand in the fabric of her sweater, kissing her and kissing her and kissing her as your body disintegrates and reknits itself together over and over again, a dizzying, blissful spin-cycle that rips the breath right out of your lungs.

She is kissing you. Kanaya Maryam is kissing you, and you are kissing her back, and you keep waiting for the panic, for the desire to pull back and run away, but it doesn’t come. 

You break apart entirely too soon; you’re reluctant to let go of her waist, so you don’t, and she seems to have similar sentiments regarding her hand placement on your face. She runs her thumb across the hollow of your cheek, looking for all the world like she is the most gorgeous thing in it, and you remember, a little distantly, that you were saying something before.

“Oh.” Your head feels like it’s about to disconnect from the rest of your body. “I like you.”

She smirks a little and drags her finger under your lip, wiping away some of her makeup that’s rubbed off onto you. Your whole body starts buzzing. “You don’t say.”

“Kanaya.” It’s very hard to talk all of a sudden. Especially when she drops her hands from your face to trace the column of your throat lightly. _Oh_. “There’s—I’m still—I’m still working through—like you said, it’s not an overnight process, and I still have certain, um, barriers in place, as it were, and I—”

“That’s okay.” Her hands have stopped on your shoulders, and you’re a little grateful for that. If she had kept them on your neck for much longer you were probably going to have popped a blood vessel. “That’s okay, Rose.”

The _R_ rolls of her tongue in a way that makes your brain white out temporarily. “I just—I don’t want to make you feel like you have to do anything, or—I don’t want to rope you in, or—”

“You’re vastly underestimating my ability to make choices for myself here, Rose.” She raises her eyebrows a little, tracing the outline of your collar bone through your shirt. Honestly, you don’t even know if she notices she’s doing it. You certainly do, though. “If anything, I’m the one who should be assuring you right now that you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, especially not for my sake.”

You shake your head. “No, god, no, you’re _fine,_ you’re—you—I just—I was such a mess, and I’m—god, _was_ , as if—” 

“You asked me some time ago why I am so nice to you, I believe.” She blinks. The gold in her eyes spirals, and you have to take a single, shuddering breath to make yourself stay on task. “I said because it’s you. A trite way of putting it, perhaps, but true. Very true. And I rather find myself applying that sentiment to the concerns you raise.”

Your heart skips about twenty beats in your chest. The expression on your face is one of blissful stupidity, you’re certain, and you can’t even bring yourself to care much. Not when Kanaya is looking at you like that—warm and happy, her glow even more pronounced than usual. 

Not when Kanaya is looking like that, period. Christ.

“Ah,” you manage. Woefully inadequate, as usual.

Still, she smiles, moving her hands back up to your face. “Your human vernacular sometimes confuses me,” she admits. “Your species is both overly concise and laboriously vague about everything, especially regarding matters like this.”

“Careful, you’re starting to sound like Karkat now.”

She flicks your shoulder, smirking a little. “Hush. Having said that, though, I think it’d be appropriate for me to borrow a term you yourself just utilized.”

Actually, you amend your earlier statement. Your heart isn’t skipping anything right now, it’s just stopped beating in the first place.

“Which is to say, I like you too.” And the smile she gives you is radiant, lighting up her whole face, the whole room, your whole body from the inside out. “Very, very much.”

And, really, there’s only one way you can respond to that: you kiss her. Again, and again, and again.

.:.

As you predicted, change does not come immediately. 

It still takes you a full three weeks after the two of you have the are-we-this-are-we-that talk—you unanimously decide on matesprits in terms of troll terminology and girlfriends in human ones—for you to tell anyone you’re gay, much less dating Kanaya. She says she doesn’t mind you taking your time on it—“seriously, Rose, I am just happy to be with you, for one, and also see no point in rushing this process in a way that would cause you distress when we literally have a full sweep left on this meteor”—and though you know she wouldn’t lie to you, you still feel horrendously bad about the whole thing.

That’s how a lot of the early days are, really: pendulum swings between extreme guilt and extreme happiness. The happiness is so obsolete, so all-encompassing that the guilt practically fades out of existence when you’re not thinking about it, but when you are, it’s just as vicious and biting as you remember. On the bad days, It makes you jumpy and cagey and _tired_ , reverting to old habits of locking yourself in your room and feigning unconsciousness when anyone tries to drag you outside. 

Kanaya says she doesn’t mind this, either. It takes time—longer than you know she’d like—but after a while, you even start to believe her.

When you do tell everyone—one night at dinner—their reactions are so predictable you’re not even sure why you bothered with the announcement in the first place. Karkat launches into some spiel about the stupidity exhibited by the human race in assigning such metric value to the concepts of sexuality and won’t shut up until Kanaya starts kicking his shins under the table. Vriska throws her hands up in the air in what you assume to be triumph—“the motherfucking deets, baby!”—and then taps the now-healed cut on her lip, wiggling her eyebrows; you tactfully become very absorbed with studying the water pitcher in front of you. Terezi says she knew since the second she set eyes on you, and then laughs inappropriately hard at that. Dave just flashes you a thumbs up and asks you to pass him the salt. 

“Really, I think that went well,” Kanaya says when the two of you are on the library couch later, your head in her lap, her tracing the shell of your ear.

You hum in assent. “Karkat’s reaction was particularly moving.”

“At least he shut up after a while.” You look up to see Kanaya grimacing a little. “I was afraid I was going to have to instruct Vriska to put him in a headlock to get him to stop lamenting the failures of human culture.”

“I’m a little disappointed you didn’t, to be honest.”

“Perhaps you can unearth some other ground-breaking revelation about yourself in the near future and we can employ that tactic then.” She smiles down at you, eyes soft, and your heart flip-flops in your chest. “They are happy for you, though. Even if they don’t say it in so many words.”

Warmth buzzes down the length of your spine. “I know. Thank you.”

She tips her head to the side a little. “For what? The shin-kicking?”

“Well, yes, but—I don’t know. Just being you.”

“Careful,” she says, "you’re verging dangerously close into the territory of sappy. One can almost see you losing control of the wheel.” But kisses you all the same.

.:.

After time—at an infuriatingly slow rate, really, but Kanaya says she doesn’t mind that, either, and really, what on earth did you do to deserve her?—the bad days stop happening. 

You don’t notice the shift so much as Kanaya does; she points it out to you one day when the two of you are in her room, her sewing, you sort of-reading, mostly-watching her. She looks up at you suddenly, as if some earth-shattering relation had just occurred to her, and you arch your eyebrows a little. 

“You good?”

Her expression turns fond almost instantly, and you have to bite the insides of your mouth to keep you from beaming at her. Really, this girl has done a number and then some on your aloof front. Dave’s been doing practical backflips about it for weeks now. “Yes, quite. Just—you’ve been doing well, recently. It just fully occurred to me, is all.”

You consider being pedantic about this for a second before the full weight of the realization that she’s right hits; suddenly, despite the cheek-biting, you are beaming, and she returns the expression in equal volume.

“Knock on wood, of course,” she says, rapping her knuckles on her desk, and you roll your eyes a little.

“Bizarrely superstitious, as always.” She is. It’s a funny thing about her, one of the many observations you’ve been afforded the time and opportunity to make that feel less and less purposeless as the days go by. 

She huffs at you a little. “Would you rather me jinx it?”

You cross the room in a few, easy strides, coming up to rest in front of her. She pushes her chair back a little and you wedge yourself to stand between her legs, smiling down at her as you run your hands from her horn-tip to jaw. “No. I just think your clinging to baseless antiquities is amusing, is all. Though,” and your mouth twists a little, “I suppose I’m hardly one to talk.”

She just gives you another irrevocably fond look and fists the material of your shirt, pulling you in for a kiss. You bend down with a smile, sparklers starting up in the pit of your stomach again. The book was awfully boring, anyways.

.:.

Exactly two months after you came out, Dave brings you a cupcake after dinner. 

“Wow.” You arch an eyebrow, setting your journal aside. “This is—something else.”

“Yeah.” He looks deathly serious, but you can see the corner of his mouth twitching a little. “Like the candles?” He points to the two offending objects, both stuck into the top of the cupcake at rather haphazard angles. “I made ‘em pink ‘cause you like ladies.”

“How stereotypical.” You grin up at him. “Did you make this?”

“Why, are you gonna say something offensive about it if I say yes?”

“Not at all. I was just going to remark that though I have yet to contract food poisoning on this trip, I’m always open to new experiences.”

He flips you off, settling down in the chair next to and dropping his feet in your lap. You pretend to be offended by it for all of five seconds. “Fuck you,” he announces, tipping his head up to look at the ceiling. “Also, no, I didn’t. It was Karkat. The dude is, like, scarily good at baking for some reason. He’s been bored out of his mind recently, so he just keep making cookies to give to the Mayor.”

“And? What are the reviews?”

“I mean, the Mayor keeps eating them, so I’m assuming pretty damn good.”

Turns out, the cupcake is _pretty damn good_ too. 

“How you feeling?” Dave asks as you set the plate aside.

You consider this for a minute. You have a girlfriend-slash-matesprit who, on top of being the most beautiful person in any known universe, is more caring, compassionate, funny, talented, and insightful than anyone you know or probably ever will meet. Day by day, the overwhelming feeling that you do not deserve her is starting to pale in comparison to the notion that you’re just happy you have her, anyways. You do not lock yourself in your room for hours and days on end, not unless you really are working. You do not spiral into panic when Kanaya sits down next to you on the couch, and now the only problem that arises when you model for her is just how distracted the two of you manage to get within ten minutes. You are looking forward to seeing Jade when you reconnect with her and John, immensely so. Your girlfriend is particularly amazing, because, really, that deserves a second mention, too. 

You do not feel weird. You do not feel terrified. You do not feel wrong. You haven’t felt even the bare vestiges of those sentiments in months. 

“Good,” you say, finally. “Really good."

“Wow.” You can almost picture him rolling his eyes behind the sunglasses. “Cool it with the word vomit, sis.”

“Would you like a tirade?” you enquire. “I can give you a tirade of Karkat Vantas-esque proportions if you’d prefer."

“Nah, nah, I’m good. You keep it in that pretty little head of yours.”

“Don’t be patronizing.”

He flashes your a shit-eating grin, and you find yourself returning the gesture with a surprising amount of sincerity.

“Thanks,” you say, resting your hand lightly on his forearm for a second. When he doesn’t pull away, you place it down more firmly. “Thank you, Dave.”

He rubs the back of his neck, waving your comment away with a vague sweep of his hand, which you suppose is the closest he’ll ever get to being embarrassed around you. It’s a funny combination of deeply amusing and endearing. “No biggie. You woulda done the same for me, after all.”

“I didn’t, though.” Out of all the guilt you’ve retained, this makes up the bulk of it. You didn’t. He went through that alone.

In the gloom of the kitchen, his sunglasses glint, two tiny circles of white reflected in upper left-hand corners of them like little moons. “But you woulda.”

You wonder if things like this can just be that simple as well. After time, too, you start to think that maybe they can.

.:.

In the end, Kanaya beats you to saying it.

You’re curled up in your bed, handful of Karkat's romance novels the two of you had spent the afternoon gleefully tearing apart long since discarded in favor of you planting your whole body on hers, head on her chest, arms wrapped around her waist. She has her hands on the small of your back, tracing up and down the ridge of your spine, occasionally bending her neck down to press kisses to the crown of your head. 

A small smile works its way onto your face, and even though it's probably dopey and stupid-looking, you keep it there, pressing your cheek to the center of her chest, her heartbeat thrumming through you as your eyes start to slide shut.

It’s just as you’re staring to drift off to the wonderful combination of the smell of jasmine and the sound of her heartbeat in your ear and the never-ending warmth she always seems to transmit onto you when she shifts a little, one hand coming to rest under your chin, tilting it up to look at her. You hum a little, blinking slowly. Her incisors slip over her bottom lip as she smile.

God knows how many times you’ve looked at her by now, and yet her beauty never fails to make your breath catch in the back of your throat. You think you could spend the rest of your indescribably long life looking at her and still never stop feeling the little buzz, the little blast of warmth seeing her gives you. You hope you never do.

You don't recall becoming this trite, at least not consciously so, but you can't even find a modicum of something within yourself to care. Not when kanaya is looking at you like that—soft and gentle and so full of an indescribable warmth it makes your heart stutter in your chest.

“Hm?” You blink, sleepily, and allow a smile to spread across your face as she reaches out to tuck a strand of hair behind your ear.

“I love you.”

It’s hard to speak around the lump in the back of your throat—you’ve been learning the meaning of happy tears as of late—but you give it a shot, anyways. “I love you too.” You stretch forward to press a kiss to her nose. “More, actually.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah.” Another kiss to the corner of her mouth. “Sorry ‘bout it.”

“Agree to disagree, I guess.”

She meets you in the middle for the next kiss. You can feel her smile against you.

Your name is Rose Lalonde, you are fourteen years old, and you are happy. You are in love. You are warm. 

.:.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> et fin THANK U GUYS for reading omg !!! every kudos and bookmark and comment has been So so appreciated wtf. u all are the best i hope u liked this !!


End file.
